Текст книги "The Last Novel"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

Epi oinopa ponton.

Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.

Which were forever heaped up precariously on the floor below his desk.

In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew – by the age of sixteen.

October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.

Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.

Wondering how many lifetime scribes and/or manuscript copyists were put out of work in the decades immediately after Gutenberg?

Wondering why the plural of still lifeis still lifesand not still lives?

Sofa-size.

Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four.

You have reached Ned Klein. Please leave a message after the beep.

When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.

Said Hokusai. At seventy-three.

Windy humbuggeries.

Mark Twain found in Scott.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe.

Faulkner once called Twain in turn.

The 2005 Vienna exhibition featuring erotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele – at which patrons arriving nude or in skimpy bathing suits were admitted free.

Colossal ennui. It seems to me that I could write something like it tomorrow by taking inspiration from the cat walking over the keyboard on my piano.

Said Prosper Mérimée of Tannhäuser.

It is impossible to finish any of his plays, they are pitiful.

Claimed Napoleon reShakespeare.

A lot of twaddle.

Confirmed George III.

More than sixty percent of the people in the United States do not know what the capitalized word Holocaustin its common contemporary usage stands for.

Assuming that Saul Bellow was aware of the Moses Herzog mentioned in passing in Ulysses?

A desperate Stevie Smith addict.

Sylvia Plath called herself.

April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died on.

Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Declared a Utah senator named Orrin Hatch – presumably a former honors student in Logic 101.

Clov: What is there to keep me here?

Hamm: The dialogue.

The Girl of the Golden West,Act III – in which the soprano arrives on stage on horseback.

Renata Tebaldi was petrified.

One of the earliest translations of the Bible in America – into Mohawk.

At one juncture during his years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville was forced to take a cut in salary – from $4.00 to $3.60 per day.

Oscar Hammerstein’s first job in America, in a cigar factory, paid him two dollars a week.

Andrew Carnegie’s, in a cotton mill, had paid $1.50 – for twelve-hour days.

Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper died in.

Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Novelist also happens to be typing this last book only short blocks away from.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus,ca. 1485.

And a dozen or so years later sent Amerigo Vespucci sailing westward.

To cause justice to prevail in the land.

To prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.

To better the welfare of the people.

– Read portions of the Code of Hammurabi – from what may have been as early as 1800 BC.

Anthony Burgess’s bad eyesight.

Which permitted him to once enter a bank in Stratford-on-Avon – and order a drink.

Lloyd George knew my father,

Father knew Lloyd George.

In 1907, Caruso was being paid $2,000 per performance at the Metropolitan.

$2,000 in 1907currency.

The uncanny sense of atmospherein certain Constable landscapes.

So that looking at them could make one worry that he might need an umbrella, Fuseli said.

Remembering next to nothing about The Courtship of Miles Standish– except that Longfellow himself was in fact descended from Priscilla and John Alden.

Mozart wrote his Thirty-Sixth Symphony, the Linz,in at most three days.

In the period when artists of stature were called upon to paint likenesses of hunted murderers on the walls of Florentine buildings, Andrea del Castagno’s led to so many captures that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati– Andrea of the Hanged.

Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.

Roger Fry said.

January 11, 1966, Giacometti died on.

The Marquis de Sade was at least once arrested for sodomy.

And once for severely beating a young woman.

While also being implicated in the deaths of two prostitutes after an overdose of aphrodisiacs during an orgy.

Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.

Said Richard Serra.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.

Said Wayne Gretzky.

Ivy Compton-Burnett died after a bronchitis attack.

Martin Luther King’s seminary studies – during which he received a grade of C in public speaking.

A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Said Rebecca West.

He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.

Added Evelyn Waugh.

Very dirty and completely worthless.

Edith Sitwell called Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Wholly ignorant.

Waugh called Sitwell.

Wonderful, this death.

Allegedly said William Etty, as it occurred.

Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.

And the lowest ranked.

Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four.

An incomparable painting by Apelles, which Augustus brought from Cos to Rome, where it was slightly damaged.

And where not one contemporary Roman artist had the confidence to attempt to restore it.

Auden’s notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.

But Henry James, never.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.

Concluded Kelvin. In 1900.

I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company.

Quoth John Cheever – reJohn Updike.

Euripides’ father may have been a tavern-keeper.

Still curious all these years later as to why Faulkner would have given two of his major characters names then current in widely syndicated comic strips.

Though for that matter he gave three others the names of buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.

A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself as being well on the road to old age – having long since passed forty.

Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of forty-two.

Writes Daisy Ashford.

Anacreon, so highly acclaimed as a poet that the Athenians placed a statue of him on the Acropolis.

And so well known for other proclivities that Pausanias says the statue showed him drunk.

November 30, 1943, Etty Hillesum died on.

I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much.

Wrote Poe to a friend.

Reading a book in translation:

Like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side turned out, said Cervantes.

Traduttore, traditore– translator, traitor, the Italian has it.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, his full name was.

Frank Raymond Leavis.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail.

Inscribed on a painting by Jacob Jordaens:

Nihil similius insano quam ebrius– Nothing is more similar to a lunatic than a drunkard.

According to Liszt, Chopin had blue eyes.

According to everyone else they were brown.

The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.

Wrote Rousseau.

Catherine the Great died after having suffered a stroke and fallen from a commode in the royal water closet.

Eric Andrews here. Well, actually not here. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the signal.

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s father was a construction worker on the Suez Canal.

The Homeric combat between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal at a 1977 cocktail party – In which Mailer threw a drink into Vidal’s face – and Vidal bit Mailer on the finger.

Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, near Bristol, J. K.

Rowling was born at.

Rilke’s over-sentimentalizing of the poor.

Did he ever once sit shivering in an attic? Kurt Tucholsky asked.

Why did Harper Lee never write another novel?

First, check the acoustics. Then make sure you know where the fire axe is.

Being Charles Mingus – offering advice reperforming in unfamiliar basement jazz clubs.

Intellectual – hen-pecked you all.

Being Byron – reaching about as far as possible for a rhyme in Don Juan.

So exhaustive was Raphael’s study of ancient sculpture in Rome that the city itself named him Keeper of Inscriptions and Remains.

Prokofiev was fifteen years older than Shostakovich.

The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othelloby touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West – near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Warren Spahn died in.

Because of having lived openly with George Henry Lewes, who was married, George Eliot was denied burial in Westminster Abbey.

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

The last time anyone mentioned James Jones.

March 22, 1417, Nicolas Flamel died on.

In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.

Apparently the first ever written of a composer.

Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old.

Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar – which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.

Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.

Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.

Said François Mauriac.

Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate – for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.

I am half sick of shadows, said

The Lady of Shalott.

Tirra lirra, by the river

Sang Sir Lancelot.

Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogywithout also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?

Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of I Promessi Sposi– and twelve more on the final version.

Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.

Readily read?

A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat – with his left hand.

When Homer specifically describes him as using his right.

The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!

I will make you a bet on that, Andromache.

– Reads an exchange in Tiger at the Gates.

I just pretend.

Explained Laurence Olivier.

A pale, gentle, frightened little man.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife described a not yet middle-aged Thomas Hardy as.

Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.

And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairiehe was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.

The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.

Depending upon which of his mistresses he felt like visiting.

Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.

Chardin died at eighty – without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault.

Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

Johnson told Boswell.

Chingachgook —

Pronounced Chicago, I think, said Mark Twain.

Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed – and slept on newspapers.

Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps – with an accomplice named Picasso.

Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.

Said Martial.

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it – that’s all right.

Says a last unfinished letter of van Gogh’s found after his death.

The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.

Said Socrates.

Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.

August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.

Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps – schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of The Prince and the Pauperand Around the World in Eighty Days.

God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.

Said Elie Wiesel, visiting at Auschwitz a half-century later.

Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.

Said Raglan during surgery after Waterloo.

Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.

Indeed an entire apple orchard.

Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.

Stravinsky called Benjamin Britten.

The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.

Determined Jefferson.

As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.

After thirty-seven plays, and probably parts of others, plus the poems – did he have no inclination to write anythingin those last years?

Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden said.

I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.

Said Disraeli, correcting one of his final speeches.

Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.

Wrote Pliny the Younger to Tacitus – in the early second century AD.

I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.

Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse Tavern – who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.

Leonardo described his response to critics as.

Ancora imparo,said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.

Still, I’m learning.

More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.

Joshua Reynolds saw in Julio Romano.

Me retracto de todo lo dicho,I take back everything I told you.

Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings.

Everything useful is ugly.

Said Gautier.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

Said Constable.

The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his Blue Boyto mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.

Nicanor Parra’s day job —

Professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile.

Miroslav Holub’s —

Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.

Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.

Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.

Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.

So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.

And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.

Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.

The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.

Says Gissing in New Grub Street.

And to this day is every scholar poor:

Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.

Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.

October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.

Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.

As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.

Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.

Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.

Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.

Said the critic Saint-Victor of L’Éducation sentimentale.

M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.

Said Le Figaroof Madame Bovary.

Why, this is very midsummer madness.

We live not as we will – but as we can.

Said Menander.

Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —

Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.

Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in OdysseyVIII.

Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?

Languidezza per il caldo– Languidly, because of the heat.

Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the Summersegment of The Four Seasons.

For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.

In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.

Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.

Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.

The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on – and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.

Anyone who would employ the word diarrheicto describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysseshas either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.

Ulysses. Diarrheic,unquote. Dale Peck.

Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time – Finnegans Wake.

Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.

America’s Emily Dickinson dime?

Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

Once said Richard Brinsley Sheridan to a pretty girl.

My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.

Once said Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer – the threecenturies in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.

January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.

Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.

Gogol’s.

Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.

Hesiod said.

Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:

I tell you, the Virgin dressed herself as a poor woman. And you represent her as a whore.

This approximately one hundred years before he might have been able to view Caravaggio’s version of her death – effected with such prototypal naturalism that her feet are not clean.

A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

Gauguin says Mallarmé said.

In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.

Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitutewas first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.

And had to be advertised with the word Putainblacked out.

Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Being the works that Milton, blind, most frequently asked to have read to him.

Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.

Sit in thy cell – and thy cell shall teach thee all things.

Said Saint Anthony.

Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath – or even washing his face.

Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians – who expended endless ingenuity in forever attempting to make each other break up into onstage laughter.

Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.

Wine,the title of John Gay’s first published poem was.

In which he insisted that no one who drank only water could ever become an author.

One’s first glass of the day is a great event.

Acknowledged Thackeray.

Not drunk is he who from the floor

Can rise alone and still drink more.

Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.

Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.

A manual-winding pocket watch, Einstein carried.

Snivel in a wet hanky, D. H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.

At fifty-eight, two years before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of fourteen pounds.

And did not have the money.

Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals.

Being among Pablo Neruda’s more kindly appellations for authors not concerned with politics.

Little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on earth.

Mencken called the Christian concept of immortality.

Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

Inquired someone’s palindrome – after use of a bathroom at Faber and Faber.

Well over a century after Dostoievsky’s death in St. Petersburg, a great-grandson named Dmitri Dostoievsky still lived there – working as a tram driver.

Twenty-some years after Missolonghi, Teresa Guiccioli married a Parisian marquis – who was known to habitually introduce her as Ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.

August Comte married a prostitute.

Ibsen’s terror of even the smallest dog.

The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

Zurbarán died penniless.

The final entry reFrans Hals, dated September 1, 1666, in the records of the Haarlem Paupers’ Fund – listing four florins for a gravedigger.

An immense nausea of billboards, Baudelaire spoke of.

A century and a half ago.

Closing time in the gardens of the West, Cyril Connolly called it.

A century after that.

What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon? said Pangloss.

It is the Last Day! cried Candide.

A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

Said Samuel Butler.

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

Said Wittgenstein.

Versailles, Edith Wharton was buried in.

January 8, 1713, Arcangelo Corelli died on.

Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey.

By Jacob Epstein.

Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash.

Said Pound.

The limpest of handshakes, Robert Graves said Pound had.

The mirror will not be looked into until you have returned.

Says a letter from the wife of an ancient Chinese poet.

Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning was once discovered about to spike his coffee with weed killer – presumably thinking it whiskey.

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

The only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to be, Johnson said.

Chloroform in print.

Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon.

Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.

Unquote, Gertrude Stein.

Oh, dear —

Reportedly having been David Garrick’s dying words.

Eddie Grant, the pre – World War I third baseman, who graduated from Harvard – and who insisted on shouting I have itinstead of I got itwhen chasing a fly ball.

And who as an infantry captain would be killed by machine gun fire in the Argonne Forest.

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

Said Mary McGrory.

Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.

Judged Stravinsky.

Still to be read in the blank spaces on some of Raphael’s preliminary sketches for his Vatican stanzefrescoes – drafts of love poems to his latest mistress.

Will Durant’s amusingly unworldly conclusion that the Sappho in Raphael’s Parnassusis – quote – too beautiful to be a lesbian.

Hark, Hark, the Lark!and Who Is Sylvia?

Which Schubert set on the same single afternoon.

The word plagiarism– from the Latin for kidnapping.

To kidnap another writer’s brains, Martial had it.

Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.

Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible – while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.

Conclusions are the weak point of most authors.

George Eliot said.

If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.

Said Johnny Unitas.

Eugene Sue, most of whose widely read novels dealt with the poor and downtrodden.

And thereby made him a millionaire, Kierkegaard noted.

Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:

I wish I had.

Drawing, for an artist:

A way of thinking, Valéry termed it.

February 23, 1931, Nellie Melba died on.

Let me alone. Good day.

Said Tom Paine – to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when he lay dying.

How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.

Said Publilius Syrus.

’Tis their will – that thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.

The most tragic of the poets.

Aristotle called Euripides.

Proust’s excessively lavish over-tipping.

Gide’s reputation as a cheapskate.

Coryate, the English traveler, in Venice in 1611:

When I went to the theatre, I observed certain things I never saw before; for I saw women acte.

Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth – were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness – question mark.

A rejection of all that civilization has done.

Said the London Timesof a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 – which included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, others.

Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

While also referring to Miss God.

One never steps twice into the same Auden.

Randall Jarrell said.

Seneca’s Thyestes,in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.

And is described as belching contentedly.

Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

Wondering how on earth one remembers – that when St.

John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent – was of pears simmered with cinnamon.

A good man – but he did not know how to paint.

Said El Greco of Michelangelo.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

Oh, to be seventy again!

I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head – it harmonises the soul.

Said Laurence Sterne.

The pain of rereading Twelfth Nightafter far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Old age is not for sissies.

Said Bette Davis.

Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.

Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.

Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

At my age, one is either well or dead.

Leukemia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink died of.

He was greater than we thought.

Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.

Apollinaire, who was severely wounded in World War I.

And then died of influenza two days before the Armistice.

December 8, 1918, Cpl. David Markson died on.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Declares a line in Rasselas.

The Rokeby Venus. Which was purchased in Yorkshire in the early 1800s for five hundred pounds.

And sold to the National Gallery in 1906 for ninety times that amount.

Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson died in.

The Marquesas, Gauguin.

Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky – all buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

Diogenes, asking to be buried face downward —

Because the world will soon enough be turned upside down.

Every man is condemned to death – but with an indefinite reprieve.

Hugo said.

Those who know do not speak.

Those who speak do not know.

Forty-two, Kierkegaard died at.

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Said Paul Celan.

It would have been our pleasure to be bombed.

Said a survivor of Auschwitz.

August 8, 1596, Hamnet Shakespeare died on.

July 11, 1649, Susanna Shakespeare Hall died on.

February 7, 1662, Judith Shakespeare Quinney died on.

Virgil’s ceaseless revisions of the Aeneid.

Writing only a few lines at a time and then licking them into shape as the she-bear does its cubs, Suetonius says he said.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

Said Benjamin Jowett.

To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe – said whoever.

Though that insignificant dot is also the astronomer – said Einstein.

Please don’t get up, I’m only passing through.

No more firing was heard at Brussels – the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?

Thy labours shall outlive thee.

Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.

Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone – and in calamitous want.

Wondering when the last day may have passed – anywhere in the world – during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.

Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.

Commented Ionesco.

Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.

Late February or early March, 1945.

Anne Frank.

What see’st thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

His powers of mind have almost entirely left him; his late paintings are miserable; it is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties.