Chapter 49 Section five

When people recall old friends, the later impressions are often weaker than the earlier impressions.I remember seeing Lisa and her new husband, Dr. Eric Wind, during an intermission of a Russian play in New York in the early forties.He said he had "a real affection for Mr. Professor Pnin," and told me some curious details of their journey from Europe to America in the early days of the Second World War.I met Pnin many times during those years at social and academic gatherings in New York; A West End bus scene.The two of us, from our respective institutions, were attending a literary gathering in the center of New York to commemorate the centenary of the death of a great writer, attended by many exiles.Pnin had been teaching at Wendell College since the mid-forties, and I had never seen him so healthy, so smooth, so self-righteous.He joked that he and I were both vos'midesyatniki (in the eighties), meaning that we both happened to be staying at West Eighty Street that night; Pulling the two side-by-side rings on the car, my friend tried to look down from time to time, tilting his head to look out (constantly trying to check the street number of the intersection again), and at the same time talking to me about him. How Homer and Gogol used twisted metaphors that I didn't have time to talk about at the memorial just now.