I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould Page B

in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—
c’est le mot
—art and science meet in an insect.’ ”
    Returning to his central theme of aesthetic beauty in both the external existence and our internal knowledge of scientific detail, Nabokov wrote in 1959 (quoted in Zimmer, page 33): “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” When Nabokov spoke of “the precision of poetry in taxonomic description”—no doubt with conscious intent to dissipate a paradox that leads most people to regard art and science as inexorably distinct and opposed—he used his literary skills in the service of generosity (a high, if underappreciated, virtue underlying all attempts to unify warring camps). He thus sought to explicate the common ground of his two professional worlds, and to illustrate the inevitably paired componentsof any integrated view that could merit the label of our oldest and fondest dream of fulfillment—the biblical ideal of “wisdom.” Thus, in a 1966 interview, Nabokov broke the boundaries of art and science by stating that the most precious desideratum of each domain must also characterize any excellence in the other—for, after all, truth is beauty, and beauty truth. I could not devise a more fitting title for this essay, and I can imagine no better ending for this text:
    The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill which accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter. . . . There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.

    Â 
Bibliography

    Boyd, B. 1990.
Valdimir Nabokov: The American Years
. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    Gould, S. J. 1983. The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis. In Marjorie Greene, ed.,
Dimensions of Darwinism
. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
    Johnson, K., G. W. Whitaker, and Z. Balint. 1996. Nabokov as lepidopterist: An informed appraisal.
Nabokov Studies
. Volume 3, 123–44.
    Karges, J. 1985.
Nabokov’s Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera
. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis.
    Kinsey, A. C., W. B. Pomeroy, and C. E. Martin. 1948.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.
    Provine, W. 1986.
Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    Remington, C. R. 1990. Lepidoptera studies. In the
Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov
, 274–82.
    Robson, G. C., and O. W. Richards. 1936.
The Variation of Animals in Nature
. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
    Zaleski, P., 1986, Nabokov’s blue period.
Harvard Magazine
, July–August, 34–38.
    Zimmer, D. E. 1998.
A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths
. Hamburg.

3
Jim Bowie’s Letter and Bill Buckner’s Legs
    C HARLIE C ROKER , FORMER FOOTBALL HERO OF G EORGIA Tech and recently bankrupted builder of the new Atlanta—a world of schlock and soulless office towers, now largely unoccupied and hemorrhaging money—seeks inspiration, as his world disintegrates, from the one item of culture that stirs his limited inner self: a painting, originally done to illustrate a children’s book (“the only book Charlie could remember his father and mother ever possessing”), by N. C. Wyeth of “Jim Bowie rising up from his deathbed to fight the Mexicans at the Alamo.” On “one of the happiest days of his entire life,” Charlie spent $190,000 at a Sotheby’s auction to buy this archetypal scene for a man of action. He then mounted his treasure in the ultimate shrine for successful men of our age—above the ornate desk on his private jet.
    Tom Wolfe describes how his prototype for redneck moguls (in his novel
A Man in Full)
draws strength from his inspirational