For a while in this passage, Kinbote really seems to get Shade’s point. In “Pale Fire,” Shade’s poetry suggests something that Nabokov believed: that language itself is so miraculous and full of inexplicable patterns and coincidences that it seems to mirror the miracle of creation itself. Kinbote correctly marvels at the unlikely fact that anyone can read, write, or speak at all—that human consciousness can tie abstract sounds and symbols to objects and ideas in such a way that we can build whole societies and philosophies on them. Shade would see language as akin to life itself—something unbelievably strange and miraculous that people somehow still see as banal, but which should be evidence that the universe is much more marvelous and unexpected than human beings can ever know. He would agree that the mere fact of language existing is akin to learning that fireflies could relay messages from ghosts—if he were to dismiss the latter notion, it would be because it wasn’t
strange enough. Furthermore, Shade would agree with Kinbote’s conception of a “true artist” as someone who can see the truth about the miraculous nature of the world by understanding aspects of its structure that others don’t see (Shade calls this a “web of sense” in “Pale Fire”). Despite Kinbote seeming for a moment to understand the major ideas of “Pale Fire” (even without having read it, strangely), he immediately pivots back to Zembla.