Текст книги "Reader's Block"

Автор книги: David Markson

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David Markson
Reader's Block

For Steven Moore

This the way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!

– Joyce

First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader.

– Borges

Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday.

To me, or to him?

Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday.

Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before.

Picasso made Gertrude Stein sit more than eighty times for her portrait.

And then painted out the head and redid it three months later without having seen her again.

Pablo Casals began each day for more than seventy years by playing Bach.

I have come to this place because I had no life back there at all.

I have, Reader has?

Reader has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Someone nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.

Anna Akhmatova had an affair with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Late in life, not having left Russia again in a third of a century, she would be astonished to learn how famous he had become.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen, the population of Stratford would have been little more than fifteen hundred. Is it a safe assumption that he knew the woman named Katherine Hamlet who fell into the Avon that summer and drowned?

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house.

Even among the most tentative first thoughts about a first draft, why is Reader thinking of his central character as Reader?

Gray’s Elegyis 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it.

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down?

Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however.

Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall.

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me?

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an anti-Semite.

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.

Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot.

His life evidently static. Alone, seemingly without occupation or achievement, his means meager.

Emptiness.

Anthony Trollope said he had read Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairieat least three dozen times.

Protagonist?

Perhaps someone from a shop Protagonist had stopped in at, a clerk? Or merely someone in a friendly mood in passing?

Severn, lift me up, I am dying.

Don’t breathe on me, it comes like ice.

The world is my idea.

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also the first person he ever saw who could read without moving his lips.

Saxo Grammaticus.

It is not impossible that the young actress Moliere married when he was forty, and with whose family he had been closely connected in the theater for years, was his own illegitimate daughter.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

At the age of seven, Giambattista Vico fell from a ladder and fractured his skull so severely that his parents were told to anticipate feeblemindedness.

Where, this isolation?

Giorgione and Titian were pupils of Giovanni Bellini’s in Venice together. Giorgione was dead in his early thirties, in 1510. Titian was still painting sixty-six years later.

What has happened? It is life that has happened; and I am old.

Said Louis Aragon.

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox.

Said Xenophanes.

26 Piazza di Spagna.

Laurence Sterne’s corpse was sold to a medical school by grave robbers. It had been almost completely dissected before someone chanced to recognize it.

How much of Reader’s own circumstances or past would he in fact give to Protagonist in such a novel?

Tolle lege, tolle lege.

Wherever conquest led him, Alexander the Great made it a point to have botanical specimens sent back to Aristotle, who had been his tutor. A copy of the Iliadthat he carried in a jeweled chest contained emendations in Aristotle’s handwriting.

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate that he knew the sun did not move before Copernicus did.

Nobody came. Nobody called.

Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time.

Freud.

Joseph Beuys was a Stuka pilot in World War II. Monet, visiting London: This brown thing? This is your Turner?

Rene Descartes was born in a hayfield.

Ultimately, Emily Dickinson would even hide from visitors at her house itself.

Reader and this notion of his.

Reader and his mind full of clutter.

What is a novel in any case?

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography after all?

Bohemia. A desert country near the sea.

In 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Perruggia who had been working at the Louvre managed to remove the Mona Lisafrom its frame and walk out with it under his overalls.

And to go unsuspected until he tried to sell it two years later.

Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping.

Leibniz: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?

When Daumier was sixty, destitute and almost blind, Corot bought the house Daumier was renting and gave it to him.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps?

A sense somehow of total retreat? Abandonment?

Albert Camus’ father was killed in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was only months old. His mother was an illiterate charwoman.

Once, at dinner, with great delicacy Brahms told Tchaikovsky that he did not approve of his work.

With equal delicacy Tchaikovsky told Brahms that he did not approve of his.

After Byron and Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned Shelley’s body on the beach at Viareggio, they got drunk. Boisterously, shouting and laughing and even singing.

Then again, they had been dealing with remains already five weeks bloated and decomposed. Byron had at least once turned sick.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?

In Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years.

Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like?

An assemblage?

Knut Hamsun was once a horse-car conductor in Chicago.

Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyriconcould have been lost forever, for instance.

Mallarme learned English specifically to read Poe.

Walter the Penniless. Peter the Hermit.

During the four years that Dostoievsky spent at hard labor in Siberia for political conspiracy, the only book he was allowed was the New Testament. Though once in a prison hospital he found Pickwick Papersand David Copperfield.

Deus vult.

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was.

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Said Henry James.

George Bernard Shaw was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist first seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartons heaped and piled?

Innumerable books, Reader presumably means?

The name Kierkegaard translates from the Danish as churchyard.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.

Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky never finished grade school. Sean O’Casey and Alberto Moravia did not either.

O’Casey, at forty-three, was working with a pick and shovel when his first play was produced.

Where precisely would Protagonist live, if near a derelict cemetery? Possibly some sort of structure just within the grounds themselves?

That building abandoned also? Protagonist possibly stealing electricity through wires connected to the base of a streetlamp outside?

Reader sees a red brick building, in fact. Fairly small and falling into ruin, but of two stories.

None of John Milton’s daughters was given an education, though two of the three were taught to read to him in his blindness.

In languages of which they did not understand one word.

Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples.

As a boy, Tennyson could recite all 103 of Horace’s odes from memory.

Montaigne claimed he knew those and the rest of Horace as well.

No life back there at all.

What life here, now?

John Donne posed for a painting in his own shroud. And kept it beside his bed during a long final illness.

Why is Reader always mildly incredulous at remembering that the decimal system arose from counting on one’s fingers?

Several ancient oaks, also within the grounds, partly obscure the house. At night, the single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window is extremely faint.

There are wire mesh fences, in jagged disrepair.

Kathe Kollwitz lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II.

Let us read Little Dorritagain. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.

According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens.

Could one, actually, rewire the connections of a streetlamp in that manner?

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup.

On a shelf beside Reader’s desk: a human skull, a reproduction of Giotto’s portrait of Dante, two small rough orange stones.

Hrotswitha van Gandersheim.

In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old granddaughter to a park and then forgot her there.

Hospitals, Protagonist will have been in.

And grows older.

Dulcinea del Toboso.

Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on.

In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits.

Should Reader determine a name for Protagonist at this juncture after all?

Ishmael. Meursault. Harry Haller.

Should he give him children, if he is still being in part autobiographical?

A son and a daughter, then?

Zeno hanged himself after breaking a toe. At ninety.

Alexander Selkirk.

Once, not knowing which of several houses was Bizet’s, Saint-Saens simply stood in the road singing an aria from Les Pecheurs de Perles.

Surely, a clerk from the liquor store where Protagonist had already stopped in two or three times for cheap wine, recognizing him?

At twenty, Joseph Conrad tried to commit suicide over gambling losses. In later life managing to let people believe the bullet wound had come from a duel.

The cemetery is in the oldest section of the town, and the few dwellings on the opposite side of the street, modest and rundown themselves, seem to house very few residents. A point being that no one questions Protagonist’s presence.

Nor is the fence mesh at that, rather it is a more traditional cemetery construction of tall iron spikes. The gate at the entrance is partly unhinged and askew.

The paths inside are of gravel, or were, long since thinned and scattered.

Is there a need to explain the house’s availability?

Obviously a former gatekeeper’s or superintendent’s.

William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite.

A neighbor once came upon William Blake and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lostaloud in their garden. Sitting naked.

Robert Moses Grove.

Manet was so vituperatively condemned by critics that for a time he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to pose for him.

Before Cezanne had gained any recognition he once burst into tears when someone sincerely admired his work.

Nothing now, but my books.

Haller’s books? Selkirk’s?

The Persians deployed so many bowmen at Thermopylae that it was said their arrows would blot out the sun.

To which a Spartan commander: All the better, then we will be fighting in the shade.

In his mid-thirties, T. S. Eliot was known to wear pale green face powder. One of the Sitwells said it was to make him look as if he were suffering.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an American prisoner of war in Italy at the end of World War II.

Should Protagonist possibly have written books of his own once? Unnamed and undescribed, mentioned almost incidentally?

Once, he wrote a few books. That was long ago.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Rossini wore a wig. In chilly weather he sometimes wore two.

In fact only two Spartans survived Thermopylae. One was killed in battle elsewhere. The other hanged himself in disgrace.

Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada.

And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance.

Je crois entendre encore.

Early on, Protagonist will naturally become familiar with most of the gravestones.

Both of Paul Celan’s parents went to their deaths in German concentration camps.

Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont.

After Cesare Pavese committed suicide, several young women none of his friends had ever seen before appeared at his funeral weeping, in the hope of being taken for former mistresses.

They make a desert and they call it peace.

The Knight of Pentacles, Reversed: A brave Man, but out of Employment, Idle, Negligent.

Boris Pasternak so admired Rilke that he carried two letters from him in his wallet for decades.

Nothing now, but Protagonist’s books.

Those, and the graves of strangers.

Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected The Way of All Flesh.

Working as a publisher’s reader, Andre Gide rejected Swann’s Way.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Or would Reader rather see Protagonist live somewhere else entirely?

An isolated house at a beach, for instance?

Although perhaps without the even more absolute solitude that might establish?

At least with others on a floor above? A woman? Women?

Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.

Preferably separate entrances. The house on a dune, possibly, with Protagonist and the others coming and going along opposite sides of the slope.

And with Protagonist’s entrance in the rear, a sort of basement? Possibly what had once been an indoor garage?

Ergo almost never seeing these women, merely being aware of their proximity. Or hearing them, on occasion.

Raskolnikov. Bloom. Mr. Kurtz.

Rochester died in 1680. A full collection of his verse was not published until 1926.

And even then was not allowed into the United States.

Flaubert’s lamp burned with such regularity late at night in his workroom at Croisset that pilots on the Seine were able to take their bearings from it.

Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points?

In this house the same initial impermanence, the same cartons.

At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ.

Ship me somewheres east of Suez.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urnis worth any number of little old ladies.

A person on business from Porlock.

Aldonza Lorenzo.

Raskolnikov wrote some books once.

Very little happened in connection with any of them. In any event that was long ago.

Jack London committed suicide.

Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo.

Protagonist reading. Hearing them, up above.

Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.

A listing still exists of the winning runners in the Olympic Games from 776 B.C. through the next 993 years. Events in Greek history were dated by the Olympiad in which they occurred.

Kant was an anti-Semite.

That garage area, at the rear, looks out onto little more than scrub and brush. There is a path Raskolnikov/Bloom follows through the dunes, but heading away diagonally, so that he has almost no view of the upper story then either.

Anaximander was sixty-four years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad.

Being how Diogenes Laertius once situates him.

Would some sort of deck on the upper story face the ocean? How distantly perceived from the beach when Protagonist strolls there?

Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero.

Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.

How many years have passed since the last burial in the cemetery? Do mourners still appear?

Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did.

Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however.

And that souls smell in Hades.

A. E. Housman never in his life lived in Shropshire.

Ralph Roister-Doister.

It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.

Our sister, death.

Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that Protagonist can fathom.

Or are some few of the graves more recent?

Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.

When Ovid was banished from Rome, it was to Tomi, on the Black Sea.

Would Reader have otherwise ever heard of a city in Romania now called Constanta?

Anne Bradstreet’s first home in Massachusetts, a decade after the Mayflower,was at what later would become Harvard Square.

Aesop was a slave. Terence was a slave. Epictetus was a slave.

Protagonist watching the woman who appears?

After a time, finding himself waiting for her almost unwittingly?

Helen Frankenthaler Motherwell, her name legally once was.

Frederic Chopin was an anti-Semite.

Madame,

If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together.

Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.

Someone will call. Surely someone will call.

Aristotle’s may have been the first purely private library.

At forty-six, after an illness, Goya suddenly turned stone deaf.

How long can Reader deal with Protagonist’s isolation without explaining his background?

How conceivable is it for the emptiness to simply exist?

L’Être et le Néant.

Blaise Cendrars lost an arm in World War I. As did one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers, a concert pianist.

Lice in the locks of literature, Tennyson called critics.

Or will the question persist? Why does Protagonist have no life?

Having written books of his own, would he have known other writers?

Does he not, now?

After Anne Sexton turned on her car’s engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting.

Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen.

Twenty-three hundred years ago.

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

The woman at the grave.

Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written.

I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

June 22, 1633:

With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me.

Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.

Where would Protagonist’s son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them?

Will he?

Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute’s Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.

Eppur si muove.

Armande Bejart.

Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peacein longhand seven times.

An illiterate, underbred book.

Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses.

I can’t even pronounce the filthy thing.

Said Wallace Stevens of the word wombin a poem.

All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily.

Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.

How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above?

Tony Trollope, he was naturally called.

Madeleine Grey. The Chants d’Auvergne.

Why is it never part of Reader’s active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg?

Though Homer insists she was mortal.

Aquinas knew almost nothing about history.

Maigret.

Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist’s sense of his aloneness?

Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone?

Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.

But in either event had put on a clean shirt first.

Menin aei’de, tbea.

George Gissing’s first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad.

No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical?

I am completely alone here now?

Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war.

Says Burton in the Anatomy.

Impoverished and freezing, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night knock.

Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite.

The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.

Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy’s mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot.

Protagonist is completely alone here now.

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

102 Boulevard Haussman.

Even on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded.

Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.

Ananda. Having been Buddha’s cousin, as well as his favorite pupil.

The Gulf of Spezia.

Masaccio died at twenty-seven. So suddenly that poison was not unsuspected, Vasari says.

The eulogy at Puccini’s funeral was delivered by Benito Mussolini.

November 9, 1953. St. Vincent’s Hospital, Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, New York.

Acute alcoholic insult to the brain.

Taliesin.

Willem de Kooning lived as an illegal immigrant for his first thirty years in the United States.

On one of Reader’s windowsills: framed photographs of his son and daughter, a scuffed baseball, a sunbleached knotted root plucked from the Ebro.

Poe was expelled from West Point for refusing to obey military orders. Later, James McNeill Whistler would fail there academically.

Why is it commonly referred to as the Arnolfini Marriage,or even the Arnolfini Betrothal,when she is seven months pregnant?

Im Westen Nichts Neues.

Decades afterward, locked indelibly in Reader’s mind: the last two pages of Good Morning, Midnight

Ernest Hemingway was an anti-Semite.

Ingenious nonsense, Isaac Newton dismissed poetry as.

Fernande Olivier.

Dora Maar.

Marie-Therese Walter.

Olga Koklova.

Françoise Gilot.

Jacqueline Roque.

Rabelais: As for you, little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny Critics, you’ll soon have railed your last: Go hang yourselves.

A one-legged woman, in a conspicuously short skirt, manipulating swiftly on crutches along a crowded street.

Why does Reader still recall having noticed her, quite some few years ago now in fact, and even somewhat distantly?

On the actual night before her wedding, Edith Wharton had no idea of the facts of life.

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go.

There is no mention of Ockham’s Razor in anything Ock-ham ever wrote.

Protagonist walking the beach, probably every day, at water’s edge.

Oddly, Reader for the moment viewing him particularly in harsh weather, huddled against winds.

Snow in patches.

Wittgenstein was cited for bravery three times during World War I.

Fighting against the Allies.

Goat song.

How frequently would the women make use of that main upper section of the house in winter?

What sort of heating arrangement does Protagonist have?

Nelson Algren, not Sartre, gave Simone de Beauvoir her first orgasm.

The interminable recitations on the part of the dying in the Iliad,even as they are being literally disemboweled.

Then again Reader has also loved opera.

Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the border between France and Spain in 1940.

Fleeing the Nazis, he had been turned back by Spanish authorities.

Alfred Thayer Mahan. Sir Edward S. Creasy.

After fasting to a point of starvation, Gogol died in a religious delirium.

And after having burned the only manuscript of part two of Dead Souls.

The ladder! Quick! Pass me the ladder!

Martin Luther was an anti-Semite.

A Methodist parson in Bedlam, Horace Walpole called Dante.

Le Douanier Rousseau: Who is Giotto?

Ich kann nicht anders.

To the best of his knowledge, Raskolnikov does not know a soul in this place.

And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.

Jean Rhys would appear to have lived a life very like those of her several heroines, of cheap hotels and threadbare clothing in drearier neighborhoods of Paris and London. Reader has been drawn to an affecting photograph of her when young, the for-lornness already intimated.

Protagonist has been drawn to a photograph of her?

Who was M’Intosh?

How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

By Wagner’s lights, Nietzsche’s many physical ailments were the result of excessive masturbation. Cold water being recommended.

Would anyone else walk the beach at that time of year? In that sort of weather?

Rilke died of leukemia.

If Protagonist is in fact to have children, must anything be said about the years of his marriage?

About other women in his life since?

Martin Droeshout.

Richard Lovelace spent his last years in unimaginable poverty, sometimes scavenging for garbage to subsist. And dying of consumption in a cellar.

The vocabulary in Shakespeare’s plays includes 29,066 different words. There are 29,899 different words in Ulysses.

But at that moment the door opened and a personage entered who was a stranger to all present.

Or does no one come to the cemetery?

Protagonist kept company by sparrows. Field mice. A squirrel.

Christopher Marlowe’s father was a shoemaker.

When W. H. Auden died, his future royalties were left to Chester Kallman. When Kallman died only sixteen months later, they went to the latter’s father, a dentist.

Then the dentist died and everything went to his second wife.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

Savonarola was burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1498. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiori in Rome in 1600.

Savonarola was granted the kindness of being hanged beforehand. Bruno was alive and conscious.

Amarantha sweet and fair,

Ah, braid no more that shining hair!

Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.

The first lectures on Shakespeare at a British university were given at Oxford, by one William Hawkins, in 1751. In Latin.

Sick, muddle-headed, sex-mad D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves called him.

May 30, 1593. Eleanor Bull’s Tavern, Deptford Strand.

Three weeks passed before Virginia Woolf s body was found after she committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse.

Has Reader ever seen the Ouse named in any other regard, anywhere, except in Anna Livia Plurabelle?

Not one of Thomas Hardy’s first three novels sold more than twenty copies.

Skeres. Poley. Ingram Frizer.

In fact all of the women in Protagonist’s life, from whenever.

Should he remember?

Shouldn’t he?

Chronometricals and Horologicals.

Alma-Tadema.

Sir Thomas More was beheaded at the Tower of London. The Earl of Surrey was beheaded at the Tower of London. Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded at the Tower of London.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens, Yeats said.

Oremus.

Coleridge was frequently bullied as a schoolboy. As was Shelley. Shelley once went after one of those baiting him with a pitchfork.

Mark Rothko committed suicide by slashing the inside of his arms at the elbows with a double-edged razor blade.

First folding Kleenex over one edge of the blade to keep from cutting his fingers.

But who are you? You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything.

Sgt. Joyce Kilmer. Alan Seeger. Lt. Col. John McCrae.

Pergolesi wrote his Stabat Materat twenty-six. And was dead in the same year.

A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.

In Rapallo, for years, Ezra Pound spent two nights a week with his wife Dorothy and five nights with Olga Rudge.

And had children by both.

Voltaire was an anti-Semite.

Does it alter the tone of the solitude if Protagonist does have children?

Enhance it, if they are perhaps somewhere far off?

Is it workable for Protagonist to be out of touch with them altogether?

Why didn’t Kafka, once, call him a Jew and be done with it?

How different would one’s perceptions be of the entire body of work if he had?

Matisse, questioned about green flesh:

I am not painting a woman. I am painting a picture.

Rupert Brooke died from an insect bite. Alban Berg did also.

Hegel, Schelling, and Holderlin were roommates while studying theology.

Jacques Louis David’s Death of Socratesshows Plato seated at the scene in despair. In the Phaedo,Plato says he was sick and not there.

François Marie Arouet.

Well, I am completely alone here now.

Georg Trakl died from an overdose of cocaine, presumed deliberate. Trakl’s sister Margarete committed suicide also.

There seems evidence of incest.

Modigliani died of tuberculosis in a pauper’s ward.

Whistler was convinced that Bret Harte was a better writer than Dickens or Thackeray.

According to legend, Sappho threw herself into the Aegean after being spurned by a lover. Nothing is known about her age. Though in fact her hair had begun to turn white.

R. is completely alone here now?

Yesterday at eight o’clock Madame Berenge, the concierge, died.

One of James Joyce’s patrons offered to pay for analysis for him under Jung. Joyce waved away the thought of it.

Later on, unsuccessfully, Jung would work with Joyce’s disturbed daughter Lucia, however.