'A Good Night for Mothing'

Friday morning around 6:45, on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the building where my office is located, was an exquisitely beautiful moth, so colored and finely grained I might have mistaken it for a small wooden ornament, polished and painted like a broach or toy. I went inside and asked a colleague, Doni Soward, to photograph it:

It was a tersa sphinx moth (Xylophanes tersa), a nectar-feeder several hundred yards from the nearest flower, nearing death, presumably attracted by the lobby lights shining through the glass doors. I remembered the beautiful final paragraph of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), which loops delicately back to the novel’s opening paragraph:

“Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet box hedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.”

Nabokov tells us an editor questioned whether “mothing” was a typo for “nothing.” It was not. Otherwise, the novel would have had a most un-Nabokovian finish.