Текст книги "Reader's Block"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.

Said Rousseau.

When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.

Kipling was an anti-Semite.

At thirty-five, Antonio Machado married a fifteen-year-old. Who died when Machado was thirty-eight.

Or possibly now someone he will never see closely at all, not coming toward him but moving in his same direction? And always a fair distance ahead?

Continuing on to become a kind of actualized vanishing point when Protagonist himself halts?

Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.

David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.

Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Is Noah’s drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?

Avalokiteshvara.

Vanishing point.

She?

Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.

Hugh Casey shot himself.

Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.

Fly’s Photograph Gallery.

Arthur Symons on Mallarme:

He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.

Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.

Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest… when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

Ramon Mercader.

Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?

Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Moll Flanders.

My father’s a judge.

My mother pleaded her belly.

Sir Richard Burton, of the Kama Sutra,spoke twenty-nine languages.

Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Mrs. Hutchinson.

Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.

Plautus once worked in a flour mill.

Three years after Baudelaire’s death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.

There is no further word of her.

Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?

Patterned after whom?

Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.

Like Keats’s father.

The Aeneidis rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil’s assumption that his readers would recognize both.

Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.

The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.

Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.

Hannibal committed suicide via poison.

Murray Gell-Mann.

The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.

Civilization and Its Distant Tents.

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

He had become a dirty bourgeois.

Lord, don’t help us. But don’t muck it up for us either.

Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.

Whistler was an anti-Semite.

Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.

Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Good Lord. Is that the same T-shirt of mine you put on when you were here six days ago?

Jack Kerouac: Oh, well. But I did have a shower.

Bhartrihari.

And money answereth all things.

Adrienne Rich’s husband committed suicide.

Elizabeth I did a translation of The Consolation of Philosophy.

As had Chaucer.

As had King Alfred.

Though in the latter’s instance into Anglo-Saxon.

Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.

Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.

La Noche Triste.

Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and the Ukraine.

Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.

Edith Metzger.

Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.

In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.

And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.

In 1811 a huge Cimabue altarpiece of a Madonna and angels, which has been the Louvre’s finest thirteenth-century offering ever since, was bought in Tuscany for five francs.

0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

Was the diegetic diachronyof narration truly damaged by Flaubert, as Lyotard says?

Diegetic, dialogic, hegemonic. Privilege, as a verb. Foreground, as a verb. Valorize. Praxis. Simulacra. Metafiction. Logocentrism. Phallocentrism. Discourse. Signifier/signified. Aporia.

Late capitalism. Gynophobia.

Text.

None of the above.

Lang, Leaf, and Myers; Butcher and Lang. The King James Homer.

The Open Society and Its Enemies.

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

Also tending to forget that character in The Plague,Joseph Grand? Who rewrites the same opening sentence for a novel eternally, with only minimal variations?

Justinian was an anti-Semite.

In 1959, in Mexico City, Reader happened upon a Shakespeare and Company Ulyssesfor pennies in a thieves’ market. Its front cover had faded and was detached, the spine and back cover were missing. Nor was it a first printing.

Nonetheless.

Clinamen. Tessera. Kenosis.

Abednego.

Coleman Dowell committed suicide in a leap from a balcony.

As of 1994, after its restoration, seventeen of the draped figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgmentremained so. Presumably this time for curatorial reasons only, however.

Raskolnikov has come to this place. Bloom has come to this place. Rieux has come to this place.

Long hence, perhaps, Diotima,

I shall see you here.

Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh.

Vanishing point.

Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives.

Never meeting.

Mycenae.

As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.

Sergei Esenin was an anti-Semite.

Kierkegaard was probably impotent.

Miss J. Hunter Dunn.

Longfellow’s first wife died young. The second, mother of grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair, was burned to death when her clothing caught fire while she was melting sealing wax.

The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as peaceful.

Robert Desnos, who had been tortured by the Gestapo for working with the French Resistance, survived periods in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But died of typhus just as the camps were being liberated.

Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan!

James Leo Herlihy committed suicide with sleeping pills.

The Martello tower at Sandycove is near Dalkey. Which is adjacent to Sallynoggin.

Horse Badorties.

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.

Confusing one’s mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.

Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.

Vico Road.

La Vestalewas Napoleon’s favorite opera.

There is no such thing as literal meaning.

There is no such thing as intrinsic merit.

Fish and guests in three days are stale, says Lyly in Euphues.

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.

Walter Slezak committed suicide.

One of Shelley’s grandfathers was born in New Jersey.

Tall but pot-bellied, Chaucer describes himself as.

Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite.

And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.

De Kooning: Some guy came into my studio for fifteen minutes and wrote something it took six hours to read.

Belmonte. Joselito. Manolete. Dominguin.

Ilse Koch.

Otto Weininger shot himself.

For Protagonist’s less distant literary past:

Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you’ve been up to.

Protagonist: You’ll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I’m going to have?

Barthelme: Talk. And then I’ll tell you about my throat cancer.

Gondal. Angria.

Andrea del Sarto was sometimes hired to paint the equivalent of wanted posters on the walls of Florentine buildings.

As were Andrea del Castagno and Botticelli.

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

Virgil died in 19 B.C. Augustine is but one of many who appear to have sincerely believed that his fourth eclogue, which talks of the birth of a divine child, prophesied the coming of Christ.

Medieval legend would add that Saint Paul wept at his tomb for not having had an opportunity to convert him.

Caligula and his sister.

The line Les lauriers sont coupesis from a verse by Theodore de Banville.

Who filched it from an old nursery rhyme.

John Marston complained mockingly about the excessive scholarly allusions in the work of his Elizabethan contemporaries. Though proving readily able to refer to the most common current sources himself while doing so, including Vencenzo Cartari, Natale Conti, and Jean Tixier de Ravisi.

Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?

In 1985, in 653 at bats, Wade Boggs swung and missed at a first pitch exactly once.

One of Gottfried Benn’s wives committed suicide.

So did one of his mistresses.

Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat.

And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death.

Unlike the case with the Metaphysics,the title of the Nicomachean Ethicscame from either its editor’s name, or its dedicatee’s. One or both having been Aristotle’s son. Nicomachus.

Brundisium.

Dear Sir, – I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude

Yours respectfully

John Clare

Cato the Younger committed suicide with a dagger. He spent the night before contemplating Socrates’ death in the Phaedo.

Protagonist has had surgery for cancer twice?

Protagonist has prostate cancer still, but it is for the moment under control?

Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandydid not last.

Said Johnson.

Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding.

All of Heinrich Heine was banned by the Nazis. When something like Die Loreleirefused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.

Joyce died of a perforated ulcer.

Herrenvolk.

Naphtali Herz Imber.

The foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Thus Mark Twain on Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

Whose fingertips rest almost unwittingly at her groin.

For whatever aesthete’s reasons, Rilke could not be troubled to attend his own daughter’s wedding.

As a boy, Dmitri Shostakovich played the piano in theaters showing silent movies.

As did Protagonist’s mother, at approximately the same date in time.

In Kingston, New York.

Catherine Tekakwitha.

Richard Tucker was once a cantor in Brooklyn.

The greatest music critic who ever lived, Auden called Shaw.

Galgenlieder.

Jean Genet was an anti-Semite.

Elpenor. Whom Odysseus forgot to bury.

Palinurus. Whom Aeneas remembered to.

Drusilla.

Would Reader look at the skull beside his desk differently if he decided it was a woman’s?

Protagonist has it. On a windowsill. On the windowsill of the window that looks out onto the graves.

Et in Arcadia ego.

King Saul committed suicide.

Every Man desires to live long; but no Man would be old. Said Swift.

Isaac Newton was idiosyncratic enough to say no when Voltaire wanted to meet him. And again with Benjamin Franklin.

How Beautiful with Shoes.

Akhmatova, in Leningrad, her son in prison, waiting in line daily, in the hope of at least being allowed to pass in a parcel. Can you put this into words? And I said: I can.

John Berryman:

Rilke was a jerk.

Margo Adams.

Concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing.

Said Raymond Chandler.

Garbo with no eyebrows?

Cal Lowell.

One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

John Davidson drowned himself.

Simeon Solomon died in a workhouse.

Did ever a woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Protagonist has also had cataract surgery?

Gretcben am Spinnrade.

Picasso had two children in his late sixties.

It is patently more sensible, in this workaday world, to be a James Jones than a James Joyce. Said Protagonist’s father.

Mussorgsky was an anti-Semite.

The Sallynoggin Archive.

Norma Jean Baker committed suicide.

The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

The eschatology of the still white stones in snow.

Is there a woman again after all?

Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.

Alborak.

A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.

Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.

Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.

The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.

For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5 A.M. to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.

A big book, a big evil.

Said Callimachus.

During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.

Who had once been his pupil.

At Alexandria.

The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.

Sappho with white hair?

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Said Barnett Newman.

What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?

Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.

Leonora Carrington was a better painter.

Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!

Capodistria.

The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.

Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.

Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.

Boadicea committed suicide with poison.

Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?

Reader and this notion of his.

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add avecexactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other’s clothing.

And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey’s phrase.

Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.

A recording of Bella figlia deWamore,with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.

Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.

Hugo de Sade. S

imon de’ Bardi.

Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.

But then named Pylonand Sanctuaryas the best of his books.

Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.

The identities of their ultimate defeats.

Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.

A. E. Ellis was who?

Harold Patrick Reiser.

Carrying groceries, a newspaper, an inexpensive bottle of wine. Protagonist evading splattered slush from passing vehicles at the highway.

Then along the barely discernable path to the room that had once been a garage at the rear of the less than beguiling house.

Room, or rooms?

Conrad Aiken’s father shot his wife and then himself. Leaving it to Aiken, at eleven, to climb a flight of stairs after hearing the shots and walk in on the bodies.

Katherine Anne Porter was an anti-Semite.

Lady Caroline Lamb.

Annabella Milbanke.

Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford.

Augusta Leigh.

Claire Clairmont.

Marianna Segati.

Margarita Cogni.

Teresa Guiccioli.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was so depressed at the failure of his first symphony that he gave up composing. And had to undergo hypnosis to start again.

D. H. Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.

Henry Moore’s father likewise.

Much as the Nazis tried to make use of him, Nietzsche had in fact referred to earlier German anti-Semitism as both damnable and poisonous.

Beckett wrote Waiting for Godotin French, not English. Godotdoes not verbally suggest Dieu.

Laura and Beatrice. The latter having died at twenty-four.

A woman kneeling at a grave. A woman walking on a beach.

Der Tod und das Madchen.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

He is completely alone here now.

Memento mori.

Emmanuel Ringelblum and his wife and young son were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Some of his Noteshad been buried in milk cans.

Jane Ellen Harrison.

Courbet’s Sleeping Women.

Bernard Buffet’s Sleeping Women.

The Knave of Sceptres, Reversed: 111 News, Displeasure, Chagrin, Worry.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this world. Said Aquinas.

Skokie, Illinois.

Missolonghi.

Jacqueline Picasso shot herself.

For Protagonist’s again distant literary past:

Malcolm Lowry: I have a funny story to tell you, about something that happened while you were out.

Protagonist: Happened? Oh, damn, I can smell it all over the apartment. You didn’t drink my shaving lotion?

Courbet’s Origin of the World.

Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation.

Said Frost.

Philip Larkin was an anti-Semite.

Areopagitica.

Heiligenstadt.

He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.

Francis William Bourdillon. Edward Rowland Sill. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Winifred M. Letts.

Carel Fabritius was killed at thirty-two in a gunpowder depot explosion.

Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?

Photographs of anyone other than his children, are there?

Are there manuscripts?

Pliny the Elder died of asphyxiation after landing a boat to get a closer view of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Fritz Wunderlich died in a fall down a flight of stairs.

Is there a typewriter?

John Heminges and Henry Condell.

And why has Reader only this tardily determined that Protagonist will have had five or six books dedicated to him in that other incarnation also?

Even if he will not be certain he has copies of all of these in among his cartons any longer.

I think: Is it the blue dressing gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out – it’s very important.

Parmigianino died mad.

Anactoria.

Alan Ladd committed suicide.

My younger and shallower and vainer brother, William James spoke of Henry as.

So worthy a friend.

Chaucer was an anti-Semite.

Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.

Three.

Zinka Milanov. The Nile aria.

Christopher Caudwell was killed while covering a Loyalist retreat at the Jarama River in 1937. On his first day in combat.

Paideia.

Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:

What is he doing underground, that idiot?

Henri Heine, he was naturally called in his decades in Paris.

Kneeling at a grave. Walking a beach.

Eternal devotion beside the point, after Beatrice’s death Dante had at least four children by the never-spoken-of Gemma Donati.

James Joyce’s daughter.

A forty-year-old Olympia portable, in fact. Not even electric.

Modeled after whose?

Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.

And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.

Where in a masterpiece of spiting one’s face he starved himself to death.

Who’s the coon?

Asked Wallace Stevens rea photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir.

Gala Eluard, who became Gala Dali. Her affair with Max Ernst. Her affair with Giorgio de Chirico. And cetera, when married or otherwise.

When was the last time Protagonist actually did sit down to a full meal at a better restaurant?

When was the last time he let himself hail a taxi?

Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite.

Máquina de escribir.

Machine à écrire.

Macchina da scrivere.

Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.

Josef Mengele, M.D.

John Gould Fletcher drowned himself.

Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.

O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In a lawsuit that prevented him from teaching in New York in 1940, Bertrand Russell’s writings were described as lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. Unquote.

May, 1886:

Little cousins,

Called back.

Emily

Vladimir Mayakovsky had an illegitimate daughter in the United States.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gitaat Alamogordo.

Schreibmaschine.

When was the last time Protagonist took a trip? Simply went somewhere?

Principia Mathematica. Logic and Knowledge. The Analysis of Mind. The Analysis of Matter.

And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold.

Tolstoy thought King Learso bad a play as to be not worth discussion.

Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Is it evident to Reader that he has lost interest in the idea of doing anything with the women upstairs?

Do you know that the king had not even heard of Wittgenstein!

Brahms died of cancer of the liver.

Why do you always wear black?

I am in mourning for my life.

There was once an actual portrait of Petrarch’s Laura, by Simone Martini. However it is long lost.

Within two years of Stephen Crane’s death in the Black Forest, Cora had returned to Jacksonville and opened a brothel.

Beyond the dunes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

William the Conqueror came before Richard III. Announced Shakespeare through a dark window to Burbage.

Carlos Arruza died in a car crash.

In one of Protagonist’s own unread books, perhaps? Why does Reader think of him sensing he should remember something about someone else who often walked along a beach?

Teresa Stich-Randall.

Regine Olsen.

Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite.

All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil, an Ezra nicety.

Protagonist the Penniless. Protagonist the Hermit.

Deus vult?

Bachelard. Baudrillard. Blanchot. Barthes. Bataille.

Sorting, packing.

Toward what final bleak contemplation amid the disarray?

I have read Mr. Scott’s book fourteen times; and it is a rather tiresome book.

Said someone of The Architecture of Humanism.

Condorcet probably committed suicide.

The first writer known to condemn slavery is Euripides.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

If forced to choose, Reader assumes, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Giacometti.

September 28, 1891, 12:30 A.M. 104 East 26th Street, New York. Cardiac dilatation, mitral regurgitation, contributing asthenia.

Melville.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.

Why is virtually all landscape in Andrea Mantegna comprised of rock?

How many times had Reader heard the Smetana before he discovered that the Moldau was a river?

Among the Ouses and the Ebros in Anna Livia Plurabelle.

One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.

Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein was born in.

Among the Meuses and the Marnes.

Allen Mandelbaum’s Aeneid.Mackail’s.

La Pasionaria.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Jane Austen. Anne Bradstreet. Cervantes.

Pierre Menard.

Or actually some few with certain other writers at that? In antique five-and-ten-cent store frames?

And everyone young?

Cicero was an anti-Semite.

Certain legends would insist that Pontius Pilate committed suicide.

In last year’s nests there are no birds this year.

The beach, or the cemetery?

What follows for Protagonist in either case?

Patron saint of desperate causes?

In a dramatic and not narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Still, for all slips of hers,

One of Eve’s family—

Wipe those poor lips of hers

Oozing so clammily.

Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.

Hearing of acquaintances who have died, alone, to be found by strangers.

According to indictments of the time, on May 23, 1450, Sir Thomas Malory raped the wife, Joan, of one Hugh Smyth, in Warwickshire.

On August 6, Malory raped said Joan again.

Joyce called How Much Land Does a Man Need?the greatest of all short stories.

Gaspara Stampa. Mihri Hatun. Louise Labé.

I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Quelqu’un vit sur cetteplage.

Alguien vive en este play a.

The end of his life in a shabby furnished room across the street from the railroad station in Frankfurt. Oskar Schindler.

Bernard Berenson was an anti-Semite.

Bernard Berenson was born a Jew.

Character! What is character! It’s tone that matters!

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a strange land?

One minute she was standing in the door.

Passchendaele.

The Tunning of Elynour Rumming.

When Leonardo died in France, in 1519, it was in the arms of the king, Francis I, who had come to his bedside. Insists Vasari.

Ipse dixit.

February 2nd. Joyce’s birthday.

And Protagonist’s daughter’s.

October 25th. Picasso’s.

And Protagonist’s son’s.

The first edition of Thus Spake Zarathustrasold forty copies. Nietzsche had had to pay for publication.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Aristophanes.

Delacroix, on Ingres:

His art is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.

Demosthenes committed suicide with poison.

In the same year that Aristotle may have done so.

Grieg wrote his piano concerto at twenty-five.

And would produce nothing else of significance on a large scale in almost forty more years of composing.

Arnold Toynbee was an anti-Semite.

Orde Wingate.

I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent, Scott Fitzgerald said.

Capt. Wilfred Owen was an acting company commander, attempting to cross an enemy-held canal, when he was machine-gunned.

Wilhelm Furtwangler. Herbert von Karajan. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Alfred Cortot. Kirsten Flagstad. Walter Gieseking. Inextricably bedfellowed with the Nazis.

As was Gigli with the Italian fascists.

That nearby, Protagonist awakening mornings to the wash of the surf?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Thesmophoriazusae.

Anne Sexton sometimes allowed a recording of the Bachianas Brasileirasto replay itself endlessly when she was writing.

But now they that are younger than I have me

in derision,

Whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs

of my flock.

The Virgin for those who have nobody them with.

André Malraux flew sixty-five missions as the commander of the Loyalist air force. And in World War II was captured twice by the Germans while a leader of the Resistance, and twice escaped.

Was Moses murdered in the wilderness?

Was willst du _yfremder Mensch?

Bidú Sayão.

Freud and Frazer were immediate contemporaries. Freud read a good deal of Frazer. Frazer did not read one word of Freud.

Kurt Tucholsky committed suicide.

Henry Miller was an anti-Semite.

Les Nuits d’Été.The poems Gautier’s.

Whittier threw Leaves of Grassinto a fire.

Suffering Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning once had to be prevented from eating a cigarette.

With kings and counsellors, murmured I.

Xanthus.

Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read?

What piece of music, the last he ever heard?

Matthew 27:3–5 says that Judas hanged himself.

I am old, and can no longer work, and am without means of livelihood, and my wife is ill.

Said Paolo Uccello on a tax declaration in Florence in 1469.

Un grand peut-être.

Sacajawea.

Fanny Imlay committed suicide with laudanum.

Rubens was fifty-three when he married his second wife Hélène. Who was sixteen.

No more behind

But such a day tomorrow as today

And to be boy eternal.