Текст книги "Reader's Block"

Автор книги: David Markson

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For reasons unknown, John Wycliffe escaped being burned as a heretic. Though forty years after his death his remains were dug up and dumped into the River Swift.

Which flows into the Avon.

Jimmy Whistler, he was naturally called.

Rubens often had the Latin classics read to him while he was working.

Canova later did the same.

Schopenhauer’s first published work was his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

His novelist mother said it sounded like something for druggists.

George Santayana was an anti-Semite.

It is virtually certain that Lucrezia Borgia never poisoned anyone. Or committed incest. Victor Hugo and Gaetano Donizetti notwithstanding.

Why is the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens rather than vice versa?

Enter Caesar, in his nightgown.

Hannah Wilke’s final exhibition.

Randall Jarrell is assumed a suicide. He would appear to have stepped quite deliberately into the path of the car that killed him.

Well he kept her there in a bath

With a gallon of lysol in a bath

Gerald died that afternoon.

Victor Hugo, hélas!

Utrillo once pawned Modigliani’s only decent clothes to buy wine.

Ernest L. Thayer majored in philosophy under William James at Harvard.

C. P. Cavafy lived with his mother until he was thirty-six.

No, no! said the Queen. Sentence first – verdict afterwards.

The man himself lay in the bed.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in an infantry charge in France in 1915.

T. S. Eliot’s father manufactured bricks.

William H. McGuffey.

William H. Bonney.

Levi-Strauss:

The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.

Jackson Pollock once held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks.

Work out your own salvation with diligence.

For all his madness, it would turn out that Holderlin had furtively kept all of Suzette Gontard’s letters throughout the forty years between her death and his own. Eighty years after that they would come to be published.

And somewhere men are laughing, and

somewhere children shout.

Tennyson said that scissorswas the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.

Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.

Ronsard was so prodigally admired during his lifetime that both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots sent him gifts. And then was unread for two centuries.

Boswell’s practice of scribbling down every other word Johnson said irritated any number of their acquaintances. Ill-bred, Hester Thrale called him.

W. H. Davies lost a foot while jumping a freight train.

Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Said Pascal.

Pythagoras claimed to remember visiting Hades between his several alleged reincarnations.

And having seen Homer hanging from a tree and Hesiod in chains because of their disrespect for the gods.

In Gargantua,Epistemon makes the same visit. Reporting that Achilles is a beggar, Hector supports himself by scraping pots in a kitchen, Helen is a madame, Alexander darns socks, Cleopatra sells onions, and King Arthur cleans grease out of hatbands.

According to Xenophanes, Pythagoras also once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

At least one more for Protagonist’s background?

Again then, not infinitely long past. A woman named Susan, who edited books. But also snapped some photographs of him that will presumably now remain the last he will ever have had taken.

Brett Ashley.

Anna Wickham committed suicide.

Stephen Foster died after a fall in a rooming house on the Bowery.

He owned thirty-eight cents.

Seneca was an anti-Semite.

Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Roman Jakobson. Michel Leiris. Julia Kristeva. Phillipe Sollers. Louis Althusser. Paul Ricoeur.

All variously attended seminars of Jacques Lacan’s.

Yannis Ritsos. Iannis Xenakis.

Jeanne Hebuterne, with child, jumped from a window on the morning after Modigliani’s death.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Are there things to be put down?

David Smith died in a car crash.

The sitter for the Mona Lisawas one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Francesco del Giocondo.

Presumably her eyebrows were plucked.

James Russell Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Wertherseven times.

Trying to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

Not to call. Not to go. Not to do.

Or was he not even that fully aware of the process until he found it to be a fait accompli?

The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.

Cosimo Tura died in a poorhouse.

Discordia concors.

Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant.

Shakespeare was eighteen.

Casta diva.

Aristotle was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad and died in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth.

Ergo having been either sixty-two or sixty-three.

He may also have died a suicide. Diogenes Laertius says he drank wolfsbane. Though most other sources blame chronic indigestion.

The Poemsof Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold two copies.

Guido Reni.

Who was once as widely admired as Ronsard.

The reign of the shopwindow, Ortega called it as long ago as in 1930.

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels – bring home.

It cost Baudelaire five years of letters and poems to coax Madame Sabatier into bed. Once. Whatever calamity occurred, the affair was terminated on the same night.

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

From those brown hills have melted into spring.

Arnold Schoenberg was once turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship.

Pier della Vigna committed suicide after Frederick II had him blinded. Dante confronts him with much sympathy in the Inferno.

Raymond Radiguet wrote Devil in the Fleshat seventeen. And was dead at twenty.

Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.

Wagner was an anti-Semite.

Mariano Azuela, as a physician, rode with Pancho Villa.

Dies Irae.

Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.

Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.

The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.

Dasjudentum in derMusik.

Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I. Paths of Glorywas his only book.

At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.

With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality.

Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.

Ignis fatuus.

Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.

And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.

Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.

I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.

Early in the Iliad,on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.

After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.

Bartlebooth.

Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.

Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.

Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?

Said Freud after his break with Jung.

The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

Beatrice Silverman.

Adele Morales.

Lady Jean Campbell.

Beverly Bentley.

Carol Stevens.

Norris Church.

Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.

Leave the bum be. He’s just drunk.

October 12, 1492. At 2 A.M., the lookout on the Pinta.

Named Rodrigo de Triana.

No light; but rather darkness visible.

Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del Destinoat the Metropolitan Opera.

Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.

Elizabeth Shaw Melville:

Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.

Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.

Semper incumbebat libris.Spoken of Abelard.

Not realizing that one’s future is already one’s present even as that too is dissolving into past.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.Two years after the book’s appearance Borowski committed suicide.

Via gas.

Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.

How often does the woman come to the grave?

What sort of regularity is there in the visits?

Does she sometimes fail to come?

Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.

The 1941 Concise Cambridge History of English Literaturesaid that no one would ever read Ulysseseven if copies were given away.

Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?

Hers?

Gitanjalu

Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.

Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.

Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.

Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.

Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.

Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.

Benjamin Jowett said he read Pickwick Papersat least twice every year.

Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.

Fatwa.

Myles na Gopaleen.

The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.

Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.

Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.

Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.

Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.

No greater man ever walked the earth than he.

Said Michelangelo of Dante.

Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?

How recent will he make its dates?

Has he even yet determined the age of the woman herself?

Or whether Protagonist does in fact catch sight of her elsewhere?

Counterfactual conditionals.

Beckett’s Murphywas rejected by forty-two publishers.

Gilles Deleuze committed suicide.

Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Donora, Pennsylvania. Gretna, Louisiana. Van Meter, Iowa.

Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

Gabriele D’Annunzio lost an eye in combat with the Italian air force in World War I.

Thrushcross Grange.

Lautréamont was born in Montevideo. Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo. Jules Supervielie was born in Montevideo.

Once more before I die I will read Don Quixote,said Gissing.

Graham Greene was an anti-Semite.

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me.

O yes! I am poison’d; mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.

Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his only patrimony.

Has Reader made note of enough women for Protagonist’s background? Considering all the years involved?

Remembering any number of others who could readily be appropriated.

Though leaving the critical question for Protagonist’s situation still.

Why this solitude now?

Where the Catherine Earnshaw or the Maggie Tulliver or the Sara Monday for these denatured days?

Rabbi Akiba was flayed alive.

Valéry, to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?

William Sidney Porter became O. Henry while sitting out three years in jail for embezzlement.

Muschg.

Skoonj.

El Caballero de la Triste Figura.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. As is Maud Gonne.

As is Paddy Dignam.

Mrs. Maj. John MacBride.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa and an Irene.

And an Andrea and a Judith.

And a second Susan.

Among more.

Kay Sage committed suicide.

Andre Chénier died on the guillotine.

Come un bel dì di maggio.

Walafrid Strabo drowned in the Loire.

Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by a deranged scribe.

Either it is raining or it is not raining.

Habitually, Protagonist brings a newspaper or a book when he eats at the restaurant. Although he is no more intruded upon here than at the saloon.

There being only a lunch counter and several booths in any case. Normally an indifferent short-order cook and one graying waitress. Protagonist will puzzle at how they remain in business.

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

The curse is come upon me, cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Saint John Chrysostom was an anti-Semite.

And insisted that Jesus had never laughed.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nine volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Philip Freneau died after becoming lost in a snowstorm. On his way home from a tavern.

Milton was paid five pounds for Paradise Lost.

Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions.

Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.

Even with the idea of feeble stolen electricity at the gatehouse dismissed, Reader remains locked in on a nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

Protagonist squinting beneath the dimmest of reading lamps.

The restaurant in the same Hopper wintry-sun mode as the saloon, however.

Isabel Rawsthorne.

According to Kenneth Tynan, a corridawith Antonio Ordonez was more stirring than any other performance by any other sort of artist he might name.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide.

Los Pasos Perdidos.

Rosalba Camera was blind in the last years of her life. Mary Cassatt was blind in the last years of her life.

Chidiock Tichborne. Who may have been as young as eighteen when he was executed at the Tower for plotting against Elizabeth in 1586.

And was disemboweled before he was extinct, as the Tower’s report had it.

Jean Francois Champollion.

Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.

Die Zauberflöte.

Der Zauberberg.

For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church without breaking into tears.

And went unbathed, which he construed as sanctifying.

I want to be buried with this novel clasped to my heart.

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide by asphyxiating himself with a plastic bag.

Giuseppe Berto was a prisoner of war in Texas at the end of World War II.

Wyndham Lewis was an anti-Semite.

An audience of fully three thousand gave Akhmatova a standing ovation after a reading in Moscow in 1944.

About which Stalin, hearing of it: Who organizedthis response?

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Giuseppina Strepponi. Busseto.

Poe was probably impotent.

Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth all particularly admired the poetry of Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

Felicia Dorothea Hemans wrote The boy stood on the burning deck.

We had roast pig to eat before Pickett’s charge.

Samuel Johnson’s acquaintance Oliver Edwards, who might have been a philosopher.

But that cheerfulness was always breaking in.

Jacob Epstein, to a niece: Call me Epstein. Would you have called him Uncle Donatello?

Enrico Fermi: Where are they?

The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.

The Marquis de Sade died in a lunatic asylum.

Otherwise well-informed readers who would be surprised to learn that the site of ancient Troy is in Turkey.

Where Nazim Hikmet’s work was banned through virtually all of his writing life.

While being translated into more languages than probably any other twentieth-century poet’s.

Hilda Doolittle was once a patient of Freud’s.

Was Sir Thomas Wyatt one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers? Is it certain she had lovers?

Dollars damn me.

Fata morgana.

Some few friends, at least, from that earlier existence, with whom Reader should have Protagonist correspond?

Other writers?

She has no wit, but enough sound human sense to be able to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother.

Said Mozart of Constanze.

At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.

And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.

Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

I. G. Farben.

Delacroix was almost surely the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.

A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again.

Dear Cicero. Regards, Protagonist.

Philip Larkin: Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?

Are Protagonist’s few books known at all? Ever read?

Paul Ancel. Or Antschel.

They do not move.

Cervantes is buried at a convent in Madrid, though exactly where in its cemetery is not known. Nor is there a known portrait of him.

And she came through the mist and the rain to me

From the soft warm lights of the town.

Ingeborg Bachmann died at forty-seven after setting fire to a mattress with a cigarette.

Giacomo Casabianca.

Mystified by the ear of a poet who would call a volume Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

La Vida Breve.

Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.

And was one of the few writers or artists aligned with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Like Dali.

Why is Reader always momentarily startled to recall that Keats was a fully licensed surgeon?

Does Protagonist even have a telephone?

Medieval legend says that Aquinas’s corpse was boiled and his bones preserved as relics. In actuality he was buried in Toulouse.

Ed Delehanty may have committed suicide. Having either jumped or fallen from a bridge at Niagara Falls.

El Greco would appear to have been almost impoverished at his death, though he left behind 147 canvases. Whether because he could not sell them, or would not, remains moot.

That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D. H. Lawrence.

Sue Bridehead.

Hugo van der Goes died insane.

Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.

Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.

Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever after drinking Paris tap water. Deliberately drinking it, to prove to someone it was safe.

I’m Captain Jinks of the horse marines.

Yasnaya Polyana. Max Gate. Rowan Oak. Thoor Ballylee. I Tatti.

New Place.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.

Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.

Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.

Two of Alma Mahler’s three husbands, Mahler and Franz Werfel, were Jews.

Axel Springer Verlag.

Euripides was more frequently quoted by both Plato and Aristotle than was any other playwright. Plutarch says that Alexander quoted him repeatedly also. At a banquet not long before his death he recited an entire scene.

When John Stuart Mill’s maid inadvertently burned the only manuscript of the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution,Carlyle had already destroyed his notes. He would tell Tennyson that rewriting it was like swimming without water.

Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.

Henry James said that Oscar Wilde was a fatuous fool. And an unclean beast.

Gropius.

Lou Andreas-Salome.

Before leaving New York: Protagonist wandering for some hours one afternoon along the Hudson River docks on West Street. Near Gansevoort.

Finding only that even the specific address no longer exists.

Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Alfred H. Hunter died in Dublin four years after the publication of Ulysses,forever unaware of his immortality.

Byron’s letters record approximately as many instances of gonorrhea as do Boswell’s journals.

Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.

A Girl of the Limberlost.

To place our purpose within definite limits, we must first investigate the nature and domain of sacred doctrine.

It is the same old druid Time as ever.

Jascha Heifetz. David Oistrakh. Nathan Milstein. Isaac Stern. Benno Moiseiwitsch. Emil Gilels. Odessa, all.

René Crevel committed suicide.

Who is speaking, and says, We were in study-hall, in the first sentence of Madame Bovary?

Like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives worked in insurance. Like Kafka.

Herder was an anti-Semite.

The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole.

Kneeling at the grave, or standing head bowed?

And why does Reader always envision dusk?

Irony and Pity, Inc.

Yvor Winters called T. Sturge Moore a better poet than Yeats.

And Elizabeth Daryush as good or better than either.

The Pali canon.

Remembering a Sarah.

And a Robin and a Beth.

And a Karen, who wrote verse.

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

And over so many years.

Nonetheless.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

She?

This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

Wolfram von Eschenbach.

A letter of Baudelaire’s intimates that his mistress Jeanne Duval was sleeping with her own brother when the brother once moved in with them.

If die I must, let me die drinking in an inn, said Walter Map.

Patrick Kavanagh was married for the first time at sixty-three. And died the same year.

Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,

Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.

Good Master Schoolmaster, do not English this.

T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs’ mother walked to dancing classes together as children in St. Louis.

Along the way passing Prufrock’s Furniture Store.

General Jacques Aupick.

The phrase down these mean streetscomes from an essay by Raymond Chandler.

And is an allusion to Tales of Mean Streetsby Arthur Morrison.

René Magritte’s mother drowned herself.

At twenty-six, Ben Jonson barely escaped being hanged for killing a fellow actor in a duel.

Shakespeare was in the cast of Jonson’s first play the same year.

Paolo Veronese was called before the Inquisition because of clowns, drunkards, and other extraneous individuals in a version of the Last Supper. Veronese convivially determined that the painting was really of a different meal altogether.

Schopenhauer:

I admire and love Mozart, and go to all concerts where Beethoven’s symphonies are played, but – when one has heard much Rossini, everything else is ponderous in contrast.

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.

Said Robert Southey to Charlotte Bronte.

Chekhov was an anti-Semite.

Edith Wharton’s family owned the Chemical Bank of New York. Wharton lived with an entourage virtually like royalty.

Old enough to remember when more people could still quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow than any other American poet.

Longfellow to the contrary, however, Paul Revere never reached Lexington. In fact he was captured.

In another ostensibly religious work, Veronese included portraits of Titian, Tintoretto, Jacopo Bassano, and himself dressed as musicians.

Not to add several instantaneously recognizable Venetian courtesans.

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five.

Pliny the Elder advised sexual activity as a remedy for weak eyesight.

And for hoarseness.

Twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, Whitehead said.

It is my general impression that the editors of Partisan Revieware capable, educated, intelligent, but have nothing to say. Said Leon Trotsky.

Cesar Franck died after being run down by a bus. His best pupil, Chausson, would be killed nine years later in a bicycle accident.

Richard Brautigan committed suicide.

In his late twenties Francis Thompson endured an almost dehumanizing poverty. At times, like Lovelace two-and-a-half centuries earlier, he picked through garbage to survive.

Hölderlin was read aloud at Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party.

Kol od ba-le-vah p’ni-mah

Ne-fesh y’hu-di bo-mi-ya.

Never to have been born is best.

Naming and Necessity.

Jonathan Swift left his money to found a hospital for the insane.

And died mad.

All art is quite useless.

Chancellor Rolin.

Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate.

Carl Andre once ate a five-dollar bill at the Cedar Tavern.

La Dama de Elche.Persephone’s thigh where Pluto clutches it in the Bernini. The right hand of Michelangelo’s David.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

I couldn’t read it. The human mind isn’t that complex.

Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

Katie King. The few extant photographs, ca. 1898.

And as fast as her time came she was delivered of a fair child, and they christened him Galahad.

Donatello’s Magdalen.

Alexander Pope was four and one-half feet tall. And a hunchback. And a cripple.

Leopardi was a hunchback and an invalid.

Pascal was a hypochondriac.

Cuautla, in Morelos. Where Zapata’s body was flung into the zocaloafter his murder.

Forty years later Reader knew a young Indian woman from the same state who would insist he was still alive in the Sierras.

Quintilian was an anti-Semite.

Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney died in a car crash.

This long disease, my life.

That long malaise, my life.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have lived in Mexico.

Palestrina. Being the town near Rome where he was born. His real name having been Giovanni Pierluigi.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Unerased for Reader even after fifty full years without once having looked at it again: the final description in Nana.

Lucretius committed suicide.

Eliot’s first wife Vivien was in a mental institution for the nine years before her death in 1947.

Joyce’s daughter Lucia was in a mental institution for the forty-six years before her death in 1982.

James Joyce’s daughter.

Thersites. Who mocked.

It was the first Ptolemy, Ptolemy Soter, who was told by Euclid that there was no royal road to geometry.

Rilke never read a daily newspaper.

The man who is tired of London is tired of life.

Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi.

Pons asinorum.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

One of Sergei Esenin’s wives was Isadora Duncan. Another later married Meyerhold. The third was a granddaughter of Tolstoy.

Cithaeron.

Sappho’s poetry was burned at least three times by the Church. Fewer than seven hundred lines remain out of probably twelve thousand, with most of those forming only fragments.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenterscoming from one of such.

In the basement of the house on the beach, an old-style wood stove?

A fireplace, presumably part of the renovation?

Wood corded near the base of the dune outside?

Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.

Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide.

Wilkie Collins maintained two households simultaneously. Both with mistresses.

Lunar caustic.

Zbigniew Herbert.

Degas was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist also recalling sweltering recent summers when imprisoned in the city? Surely the beach, but even the gatehouse, a significant reprieve?

He has licked dust from the floor of every third-rate hostess in England.

Said Harold Frederic of Henry James.

Stendhal was an officer with Napoleon’s armies in the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Sebastian Dangerfield.

Jack London was illegitimate.

In Act II of Troilus and Cressida,Shakespeare allows Hector to mention Aristotle. Who will not be born until some nine hundred years after the fact.

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

According to legend, Li Po drowned when he fell out of a boat, drunk, leaning to kiss a reflection of the moon.

If a picture of the Virgin is to be any good, I must paint it from a drawing of a woman I sleep with. Said Stanley Spencer.

Mythologies and Me.

Che farò senza Euridice?

Eduard Marxsen.

Anselm Kiefer.

Only the Americans didn’t give me a visa.

Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry.

Milton suffered from constipation.

Kathleen Ferrier. Dame Janet Baker. General Jackie Home.

Jack Kerouac lived with his mother for most of the last twenty years of his life.

Samuel Pepys attended a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dreamat the King’s Theater in 1662.

The most ridiculous, insipid play I ever saw in my life.

Paul Christman. Jack Crain. Bill Dudley. John Kimbrough.

That’s not writing, that’s typing.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

From Michelangelo:

Messer Giorgio Vasari – Many days ago I received a letter from you; I did not reply at once in order not to behave like a merchant.

César Vallejo wrote more than half of the Poemas Humanosduring four months very near his death.

Renan, at the unveiling of a statue of Spinoza:

Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head.

And my poor fool is hang’d!

Sir John Suckling committed suicide.

Babi Yar.

Gabriel Spencer.

Fifteen years after Moby Dick,Melville had to pay to publish ClarelWith borrowed money.

Fichte was an anti-Semite.

Stravinsky studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov. As did Glazunov. As did Respighi.

Eliot wore a truss.

Robert Greene died after overindulging on pickled herring and Rhenish wine.

Kuznetsov.

Yevtushenko. The Shostakovich Thirteenth.

Edgar Lee Masters was once the law partner of Clarence Darrow.

Mathis Neithardt-Gothardt.

Frank Frisch’s name was misspelled in the first edition of The Sun Also Risesin 1926 and not corrected in any later edition Reader ever glanced into.

E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!

Alys Smith.

Dora Black.

Patricia Spence.

Edith Finch.

Suppose the woman should cease to come to the grave?

What happens in regard to the woman in any event?

Or is Reader again envisioning some sort of similar situation at the ocean?

Protagonist walking the beach, at water’s edge, perhaps at a certain hour each day? Here a woman who does the same?

Vereda de Santa Fe.

Piazza San Francesco di Paola.

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate familiarity with at least five different works by Aristotle.

Lenin wrote a foreword for Ten Days that Shook the World,