Nabokov, Pnin

[Dave Monroe]

... and, just because it was what I had at hand today (really, this
stuff pretty much just throws itself in my path), from Vladimir Nabokov,
Pnin (New York: Avon, 1969 [1957]), Chapter 1, 1 ...

How should we diagnose his sad case?  Pnin, it should be particularly
stressed, was anything but the type of that good-natured German
platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor.  On the contrary,
he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical
pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings
(unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous
oversight.  It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin
whose business it was to set it straight.  His life was a constnat war
with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to
function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the
sphere of his existence.  He was inept with his hands to a rare degree;
but because he could mnufacture in a twinkle a one-note mouth organ out
of a pea pod, make a flat pebble skip ten times on the surface of a
pond, shadowgraph with his knuckles a rabbit (compete with blinking
eye), and perform a number of other tame tricks that Russians have up
their sleeves, he believed himself endowed with considerable mnual and
mechanical skill.  On gadgets he doted with a kind of dazed,
superstitious delight.  Electric devices enchnted him.  Plastics swept
him off his feet.  He had a deep admiration for the zipper.  But the
devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings after a
storm in the middle of the night had paralyzed the local power station.
The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge, leaving him with
two identical pieces, hich he would vaguely attempt to unite, in the
hope, perhaps, of some organic marvel of restoration coming to the
rescue.  The zipper a gentleman depends on most would come loose in his
puzzled hand at some nightmare moment of hast an despair. (13-4)

... "too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls,
too painfully on the alert," "erratic surroundings (unpredictable
America)," "constant war with insensate objects," "a one-note mouth
organ," er, "the zipper," well, you get the picture ...