Текст книги "Reader's Block"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

Aristotle presumed that women have fewer teeth than men.

Now and again: Protagonist seen pausing distractedly among the graves. Few of the stones are at all elaborate. Weeds abound. Leaves accumulate.

Names have already become familiar.

Very many of the dates of death are extremely distant.

A scattering, not.

Surprisingly, Protagonist comes upon a miniature American flag fixed beside one of the latter one afternoon. No one has come or gone who might have put it there that he saw.

Once I loved thee, Atthis, long ago.

Discovering that his wife had a lover, Carlo Gesualdo had the man murdered, then killed his wife himself.

And then their youngest son, on the chance that the boy was not his.

While writing madrigals still sung.

Throughout the desert campaigns, T. E. Lawrence carried an Aeschylus and an Aristophanes in his kitbag, both in Greek. Also a Morte d?Arthurand the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse.

He was able to read while riding camelback.

Dante refers to it as his Commediaonly. It was Boccaccio who would call it Divina.

Will Protagonist ever speak to the woman?

Is there a woman?

All of us have come out from under The Overcoat.

Chi il bel sogno di Doretta.

Caravaggio incorporated several unappetizing self-portraits into his canvases. The grotesquely glazed-eyed face on the dissevered head of his Goliath is one.

Harriet Shelley drowned herself.

Can Grande della Scala.

G. K. Chesterton was an anti-Semite.

There are 107,000 rhymed couplets in the Mahabharata.In sum it is almost fifteen times as long as the Iliad.

For a woman to study the Vedas is a signal of confusion in the realm. It says.

Swellfoot the Tyrant.

Short blocks away in that same deteriorating cemetery neighborhood, a lone ill-lit small grocery. There is one drab restaurant also, with few patrons.

Protagonist eats mainly out of cans.

Meaning the gatehouse will need gas as well as electricity.

Thomas Chatterton was seventeen when he bought arsenic, on credit, to commit suicide. He was buried in a potter’s field.

A bracelet of bright haire about the bone.

Wallace Stevens told Robert Frost his poems were too often about things.

Frost told Stevens his were about bric-a-brac.

Tolstoy and Gandhi corresponded.

Tchaikovsky died of cholera, in St. Petersburg, after drinking tap water that had not been boiled.

Among Protagonist’s cartons, several containing phonograph records rather than books.

Lorine Niedecker spent years of her adult life scrubbing floors in a Wisconsin hospital.

Names of the dead.

A lifelong rumor insisted that Guillaume Apollinaire was the son of a cardinal, or even of the Pope. His mother’s father had been a ranking officer in the Papal Guard.

The Second Commandment was taken so literally in the Lithuanian ghetto when Chaim Soutine was a boy that he was physically beaten when he tried to draw.

The graves of strangers.

Martin Heidegger was an anti-Semite.

Who kept a portrait of Pascal in his study. While signing his letters Heil Hitler.

Maya Lin.

John Berryman committed suicide at fifty-seven by jumping from a bridge. Forty-five years earlier his father had shot himself outside Berryman’s window.

Horace dictated that a writer should set aside a finished poem for nine years. And only then decide if it is worth publishing.

A block or two past the grocery, where the neighborhood declines into even more evident abandonment, is a dingy saloon frequented only by a remnant of elderly men. The television, if on, is tuned only to sports events. No one intrudes if Protagonist sits wordlessly with a single drink. He does not go often in any case.

Soutine was in fact once beaten so badly for sketching someone’s portrait that he was able to collect damages.

And used the money to leave his village and attend art school.

Catherine Blake: I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Berryman’s name was originally John Smith. He adopted his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried.

Walt Whitman more than once wrote anonymous favorable reviews of his own work.

Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalen who did the dishes at the Last Supper.

Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.

Meursault is fairly sure it was no one from the saloon or the restaurant who nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.

Toynbee finds more than twice as many civilizations in history than Spengler did.

Mina Loy.

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother became hysterical at the approach of the Spanish Armada.

Legend says Virgil was born in a ditch.

Protagonist has not quite enough money to get by on. Or rather he has just enough, now. Even with extreme frugality he is eating into it, however.

So that it diminishes steadily.

Toward a logical inevitability that he does his best not to think about.

Jean-Baptiste Lully died from gangrene after stabbing himself with a baton while conducting.

Mantua me genuit.

Picasso, when told that Gertrude Stein did not look like her portrait:

Never mind. She will.

Except for fragments quoted by others, everything of Menander’s disappeared utterly in the Dark Ages. A first complete play was not discovered until excavations in Egypt during Reader’s own lifetime.

Eliot was a virgin until his marriage at twenty-six. And possibly thereafter.

Erasmus was illegitimate.

Will Protagonist have sold any of his books before moving? Could he be selling some of them now, piecemeal, as it were for pocket money?

Would Reader?

H. L. Mencken called Lizette Woodworth Reese the finest American poet of his time.

Sergei Esenin committed suicide in a Moscow hotel by hanging himself with a strap from a suitcase.

John Everett Millais once painted advertisements for Pears Soap.

Why does Reader rarely remember that the Septuagint is so called because seventy scholars allegedly translated it from Hebrew into Greek in seventy-two days?

Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace. Layamon. Marie de France. Chretien de Troyes. Malory.

Nora Barnacle was a hotel chambermaid when Joyce met her.

Eva Hesse was dead of a brain tumor at thirty-four.

When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold at bankruptcy in 1656, they included paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, and van Eyck. And seventy-five Rembrandts.

And did not bring in enough to discharge the bankruptcy.

Theodore Dreiser was an anti-Semite.

Bathsheba Everdene.

Lidice.

The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.

Said Einstein.

Inside the basement section of the house at the dunes, a stairway climbs to the floor above. Because of the subdivision, the entrance at the top of the stairs has been sealed. In effect, the stairs now mount to nowhere.

Protagonist has set up the first of his unpacked books on some of the steps.

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

Georges Braque came extremely close to losing his sight from a head wound in World War I.

Or perhaps not a novel?

Is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Reader and his mind full of clutter?

No one can steal my words. These are the words of Theognis.

Should Reader bring in the most recent woman in Protagonist’s life?

From how long ago?

Does the end of that relationship have anything to do with the declension into now?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide.

Sparafucile.

Assuming sufficient time, why will Protagonist have become involved with no one since?

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Shut up, he explained.

Byron was only thirty-six when he died, yet had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth.

Nonetheless every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.

Moses Maimonides wrote in Arabic.

Lullaby. One Autumn Night.

Blessed Mary went a-walking.

At thirty-nine, Cezanne had a mistress and an infant son he was forced to keep hidden from his banker father.

Who was still sending him an allowance.

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

Antonin Artaud spent most of his last decade in insane asylums.

Botticelli, who never married, once dreamed he had.

And walked the streets of Florence until dawn, to keep from dreaming it again.

Somerset Maugham was a British secret agent in Russia in World War I and again in France at the start of World War II.

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.

Sholom Aleichem never submitted a manuscript containing a page numbered thirteen.

The mountains look on Marathon,

And Marathon looks on the sea.

Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death. She was in and out of an institution all her life.

When a new fit of madness seemed imminent, Charles calmly led her back into custody.

Would the stairway climb to a permanently locked door or in some way simply end abruptly at a reconstructed ceiling?

Wide plank steps, Reader sees.

The law is a ass.

Yehuda Amichai fought with the British army in World War II, with the Haganah in Israel’s War of Independence, and with the Israeli army in both the Sinai Campaign and the Yom Kip-pur War. By the fourth time, younger Israeli soldiers were said to be carrying his poems in their gear.

There is no god, and Mary is his mother.

Mithridates. Who as Housman says took poison in small doses, to build an immunity.

And was run through by a sword.

When Arturo Toscanini had an affair with Geraldine Farrar, would he have known that her father had been a major league baseball player in the 1880s?

John Stuart Mill read Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliadthirty times.

E. E. Cummings was an anti-Semite.

Poor Tom’s a-cold.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau suffered a constant need to urinate.

Heinrich von Kleist shot himself.

Reading romance into the relatively early death, speeding, of Jackson Pollock.

Ignoring that he killed a terrified young woman passenger in the process.

Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch! You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress!

Has Reader decided that Protagonist has definitely been in hospitals?

Should the problems be named?

Major?

Archaeologists found Praxiteles’ Hermesunder centuries of rubble at Olympia in 1877.

Exactly where Pausanias had told them to look for it in his Description of Greecealmost two thousand years before.

Come Back to the RaftAg’in, Huck Honey!

Bertrand Russell, rehaving contemplated suicide at sixteen:

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics.

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

During his interlude with George Sand, Alfred de Musset more than once woke up not long after exhausting sex to find her gone from bed.

Intently at work on a novel.

Et Verbum caro factum est.

Carlyle’s Sartor Resartuswas damningly abused by reviewers. Once he became famous he had it reissued. And included the reviews as an appendix.

A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you must not call it Homer.

Protagonist wrote a few books once. It is some years since he has seen a copy of any of them.

Fra Angelico wept while painting certain of his Christs. Giovanni Bellini once did so while painting a Pieta.

Plato founded his academy in Athens in approximately 387 B.C. and taught there for forty years. Aristotle studied and taught there for nineteen years as well.

Ferruccio Tagliavini.

Lorca was murdered by fascists at the start of the Spanish Civil War. His body was flung into an unmarked grave and never found.

Every word she writes is a lie, including andand the.

Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin.

A roundup of Denmark’s eight thousand Jews was ordered by the Nazis in 1943. The Danes smuggled virtually every one of them to Sweden on fishing boats instead.

¡Que no quiero verla!

Holderlin was insane, if harmlessly so, for more than thirty-five years. Frequently he improvised odd tunes at the piano for hours, or sang in what seemed an indecipherable combination of Latin, Greek, and German simultaneously.

Nietzsche played the piano endlessly in his own eleven years of madness. Once, at least, with his elbows.

Robert Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Milton once visited Galileo.

Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, a Tuesday.

Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616, a Saturday.

The difference being between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian. Cervantes died ten days earlier.

Thackeray had to pay to publish Vanity Fair.Sterne had to pay to publish Tristram Shandy.Defoe had to pay to publish Moll Flanders.

Our life is but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

A year before his death, already ill and with his recent work finding rejection, Baudelaire was shown essays eulogizing him by two poets in their early twenties. Neither of them had yet produced a book of his own, making their names meaningless.

Paul Verlaine. Stephane Mallarme.

Chaucer’s father was a vitner.

Pasternak’s popularity was such that if he stumbled over a line while reciting, most of his Moscow audience was generally able to prompt him from memory.

Franz Sussmayr. The D Minor Requiem.

Michelangelo finished The Last Judgmentin 1541. Fourteen years later Pope Paul IV ordered Daniele da Volterra to drape forty of the naked figures.

Which Salvator Rosa would subsequently suggest made the whole wall look like a public bath.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates.

7 Eccles Street.

The Carmina Burana.Any and all names of the original vagabond thirteenth-century poets long forgotten.

The soprano arias in the Cour d’Amoursection can fill Reader with heartache.

The soprano arias in the Cour d*Amoursection can fill Protagonist with heartache?

Poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray. Cartons heaped and piled.

Pausing among the graves.

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

Boccaccio was illegitimate. And had five illegitimate children of his own by several mistresses.

Repentant in later life, regretting even having written The Decameron,he contemplated taking Holy Orders.

But permitted himself to be talked out of this by Petrarch.

Sweet the nails, sweet the wood,

Which bore so sweet a burden.

In truth Protagonist has also come to this place because he can live infinitely more cheaply here.

Hannah Senesch.

Carl Orff was an anti-Semite.

Henry James paid for lessons to ride a bicycle.

Then we will have Homer and Don Quixote,and then we will have saunter and chat, and one more laugh before we die.

Said William Cowper, who was mad through most of his life.

Escaping after the German invasion of France, at seventy, Heinrich Mann crossed the Pyrenees on foot.

Ellen Ternan. Ellen Terry.

A one-word inquiry Reader discovers on a note sheet, its meaning now lost to him completely: Dead?

Yukio Mishima committed suicide samurai-style.

Having first arranged to be instantly beheaded thereafter.

Kawabata committed suicide also.

Goliards.

Giotto’s portrait of Dante, a reproduction of which tilts on a shelf beside Reader’s desk, was probably painted after Dante died. Nonetheless it is the only one by someone who knew him.

One does not finish a poem, one only abandons it.

Patience, and shuffle the cards.

An equally inexplicable similar sheet: She?

Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Rudolf Eucken. Frans Sillanpaa. Verner von Heidenstam. Halldor Laxness. Pearl Buck. Karl Gjellerup.

Toni Morrison.

Because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die.

Wallace Stevens was an anti-Semite.

Tevya der Milchiger.

Names for Protagonist’s children? If such?

Whereabouts? If known?

Suzette Gontard, who became the Diotima of Holderlin’s Hyperionafter their few years of clandestine trysts, died in 1802. Holderlin lived on until 1843.

Ah, my Diotima, thirteen sons she bore me. One is the Pope, another is the Sultan, a third is Emperor of Russia.

May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?

No, it did lots of other things too.

Augustine vehemently condemned all study except the Scriptures. Which is to say no natural science, no philosophy, no poetry.

But acknowledged weeping at the death of Dido in the Aeneid.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

Has it been convincingly established that Sylvia Plath did not expect her suicide to be successful?

Brunetto Latini. At Dante’s right in the Giotto fresco.

Jacqueline du Pre, who did not play Bach every morning for seventy years.

But was found to have multiple sclerosis at twenty-seven.

Does Reader still possess recordings?

Weldon Kees committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Presumably. His car was at the site, though his body was never recovered.

How old is Hamlet?

If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.

Said Emily Bronte, an hour before her death.

December 19, 1848.

A Tuesday.

You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico.

The two small rough orange stones beside the Dante portrait are from Masada. Once brought to Reader as a souvenir by his daughter.

The original Diotima was a presumably legendary priestess said to have been Socrates’ teacher. In the SymposiumPlato lets her voice his metaphysic of love. There would appear to be no other classical references to her.

Eliot was an anti-Semite.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Ariosto wrote fifty-six versions of the opening of Orlando Furioso.

A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.

Dead?

She?

Charles V once bent and picked up a paintbrush that Titian had dropped, at the time an extraordinary gesture of respect for an artist.

Convinced he was being poisoned, Osip Mandelstam may have sometimes stolen food from other inmates in his Soviet prison camp. And been beaten for it. At the end he survived on scraps from a garbage heap.

Twice, Remedios Varo lived with two lovers at the same time.

Along the beach beyond the dimes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

A French word for such, is Reader trying to recall?

A young child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.

Verweihle doch, du hist so schön.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagun.

Lemmings from Norway have been reported to migrate to a particular area in the Atlantic and then swim in circles until they drown. Flocks of birds have gone to their deaths in the same spot. Is archaic instinct drawing them back to Atlantis?

Of ladies, knights, of love and arms,

Of chivalry and boldest deeds I sing.

Velazquez painted Philip IV more than forty times.

Longinus. About whom nothing whatever is known.

Including his real name.

Carole Landis committed suicide.

Biographers who conclude at the death of their subject and do not at least briefly discuss the survivors.

Joseph Severn, who would remain in Rome through most of the next six decades. Eventually even serving as British Consul.

Claire Clairmont, who outlived Byron by fifty-five years.

Dora Diamant, who died in England well after World War II.

The historical Troy, aka Troy Vila. Specified as having fallen between 1240 and 1230 B.C. Bones of prototypal Hectors lie in the roadways, and there is evidence of step-by-step destruction.

After which the site was entirely abandoned for centuries.

Spinoza died at forty-four of tuberculosis, surely aggravated by glass dust in his lungs from twenty years of grinding lenses for a living.

Ben Richards.

The Aspern Papers.

Juana de Asbaje was illegitimate.

Hardy may have had an illegitimate son by a cousin named Tryphena Sparks.

The Sangreal. And/or Sangrail.

Dost know this water-fly?

Torquato Tasso was twice locked away as insane.

All of Plato came down from antiquity in less maimed form than any other writings, an undeniable sign of the esteem in which it was held.

Nonetheless when Aquinas and other medieval thinkers referred to thephilosopher, with no additional identification, it was universally understood that Aristotle was meant.

Il maestro di color che sanno.

Primo Levi committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell.

Through much of her life, Marina Tsvetayeva was forced to endure practically a beggar’s existence. And with her nearest relatives repeatedly imprisoned.

Akhmatova fared little better, confronted by the same family jailings, often subsisting for long periods on little more than black bread.

Frangois Villon’s mother was illiterate.

As Nietzsche saw it, the last Christian died on the Cross.

Ebenezer Cooke.

Tecumseh.

The Wittgenstein pianist/brother, Paul, who lost his right arm in World War I, subsequently commissioned Prokofiev and Ravel and Richard Strauss to compose one-handed works for him. Actually he appears to have been an unexceptional performer.

Surely someone will call?

Legend says that Hesiod was murdered because of seducing a friend’s daughter, who had then hanged herself.

And that when his corpse was discarded at sea it was brought back by dolphins.

T. E. Hulme was killed in action in Flanders in 1917.

Obviously in town, but even at the beach, Protagonist has no car. There are stores on a highway not far from the latter, however. From his entrance at the rear of the house there is a path through the brush leading that way.

The nearest village is only a short walk also.

One follows the highway or for that matter the beach itself to get to it.

Tecmessa.

Isaac Newton died a virgin.

In Brussels, in 1873, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sentenced to two years at hard labor.

Not long thereafter Rimbaud burned all of his remaining manuscripts. At nineteen. And insofar as is known wrote no more verse.

Mary Shelley was nineteen when she finished Frankenstein.

Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.

Risë Stevens.

Dewey Dell.

Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-six years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in the Syrian desert. For most of that time his body a mass of maggot-infested sores.

The maggots no more than eating what God had intended for them, he said.

Henry James was an anti-Semite.

René Char was a saboteur for the Resistance in World War II.

The human skull on that same shelf was given to Reader in Mexico by an archaeologist who had come upon several during a dig.

Its origin should be more intriguing if Reader gives it to Protagonist.

Must We Mean What We Say?

Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius were all ordered to commit suicide by Nero. Each opened a vein.

Lucan was twenty-five. He recited his own verses as he bled to death.

Three years later Nero would be a suicide on his own part.

Presumably Reader will give Protagonist photographs of his son and daughter also. Should he possess certain others?

What mail does he receive?

Anglican. Royalist. Classicist.

Degas was probably impotent.

Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson when he saw her as Ophelia in Kemble’s HamletIn later life she became a shrew.

Ah, what an artist dies with me!

Rossini wrote The Barber of Sevillein less than two weeks.

Welshman. Drunkard. Heterosexual.

Oliver Goldsmith was almost always indigent. Samuel Johnson once rushed money to keep him from being evicted. Goldsmith spent it on drink.

Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.

Kätchen Schönkopf.

Frederike Brion.

Lotte Buff.

Lili Schönemann.

Charlotte von Stein.

Christiane Vulpius.

Marianne von Willemer.

Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Baptistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.

Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door’s ten panels lay heaped amid muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before.

The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus.

Shaw lived with his mother until he was forty-two. And then had an unconsummated marriage.

John Stuart Mill was Bertrand Russell’s godfather.

James Russell Lowell was Virginia Woolf s.

Maurice Ravel died of a brain tumor.

Will Protagonist have spent time in Italy?

In Mexico?

At seventeen, when she became Abelard’s pupil, Heloise was already fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years.

And made uncountable revisions in the proof sheets of each.

Thomas Wolfe was an anti-Semite.

Robinson Crusoe is on his island for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days.

Fray Luis de Leon.

Would Protagonist’s son or daughter one day want his books?

Thackeray’s wife was insane. But was cared for in a private home rather than an institution.

Judah Halevi.

Bitter Honeymoon.

Ella Ferris Pell was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Her Salome.

Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbriick. Birkenau. Belzec. Theresienstadt.

There is no verifiable portrait of Jane Austen.

An otherwise anonymous Madame Delphine Delamare, who after numerous adulteries as the wife of an inattentive country doctor committed suicide with poison in 1850.

And became the model for Emma Bovary.

I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name.

And Buchenwald. Six miles from Weimar. On what had been a pleasant wooded hillside.

The more significant women in Protagonist’s life?

Once, obviously, more of an existence than his books and the headstones of strangers.

Children depart, miscellaneous relationships wither. Friends move to distant places.

Friends die.

Salman Rushdie lost the tip of one of his fingers as a boy. As does a character in Midnight’s Children.

Tolstoy was twice cited for bravery as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus.

And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died.

Of starvation and typhus.

God wrote the book. I took his dictation.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

Non amo te, Sabidi.

Does a lone woman walk the beach, perhaps, and with a certain regularity, as Reader visualizes one visiting at one of the graves?

A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Du-plessis, who was dead at twenty-three.

And became the model for La Dame anx Camelias.

Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.

Molloy. Malone. Estragon.

Simonetta Vespucci. Who was painted by Piero di Cosimo. And one of whose relatives the Americas are named after.

Ilya Ilych Oblomov.

D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin’s purges.

Sempre libera.

The question of truth versus legend in Alexander’s having razed Persepolis at the bidding of Thais.

The fair certainty that excessive wine played a part.

Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.

Maribarbola and Nicolasito.

Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.

One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.

And that Alexander was born on the same night.

Adrienne Monnier committed suicide.

Where Reader more broadly sees the cemetery is in a town that in its entirety is comprised of little other than those shoddy small brick row houses and fissured streets. And would seem as if perpetually guised in winter light.

A difficulty, however, being that Reader senses he is evoking the image from half a century or more ago. Where such today?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Take courage, Charlotte.

Said Anne, dying only six months after Emily.

Back to the things themselves.

The baseball on Reader’s windowsill was hit foul by Ted Williams at Yankee Stadium. Also in antiquity. Reader was with a girl named Fern Winters when it ricocheted off a concrete step and the arm of a seat directly to him.

Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of their time.

Is Reader perhaps recalling older neighborhoods in certain middling Hudson River towns like Kingston or Catskill or Saugerties, which in those days he knew slightly?

Bucephalas.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Thomas Traherne died in 1674. The manuscripts of his poems, never before published, were come upon on a bookseller’s cart in 1897.

Also in part a commonplace book?

Also in part a cento, as Burton would surely have had it?

The criminality at Aulis.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of The Unquiet Grave?

A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said.

Lucian Freud was once married to Jacob Epstein’s daughter. And once to a woman who later married Robert Lowell.

The saints have their own country.

Said Pascal.

In an apartment far west in Greenwich Village. Heat. Molloy/Malone/Estragon sorting books and records, determining which he may dispose of before departing after all.

Elizabeth Siddal died from an overdose of laudanum, very probably a suicide.

Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.

There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me.

Il Libro dell’ Arte.

Della Pittura.

Reader is well aware that sooner or later a decision had best be made between the cemetery and the beach.

D. H. Lawrence was an anti-Semite.

Petrarch owned a Virgin by Giotto. Leaving it to someone in his will, he felt it necessary to point out that the benighted would still not have learned to appreciate the artist.

Jean Genet was illegitimate.

H. H. Munro was killed by a sniper on the French front in 1916.

In Canto IV of the Inferno,which is to say with 96 percent of his chief work yet unwritten, Dante has the temerity to rank himself sixth in the company of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.

Underestimating.

Hannah Arendt:

We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius, or whether it is the daydream of those who are not geniuses.

Will Watt ever actually meet or at least speak with the woman who comes to the cemetery?

Whose is the grave at which she visits?

Aubrey Beardsley was dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five.

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

Melville worked as a customs inspector in Manhattan for nineteen years, out of an office on West Street near Gansevoort. His highest wage was never more than four dollars a day.