Does he not, now?
After Anne Sexton turned on her car’s engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting.
Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen.
Twenty-three hundred years ago.
Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
The woman at the grave.
Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written.
I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.
June 22, 1633:
With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me.
Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.
Where would Protagonist’s son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them?
Will he?
Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute’s Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.
Eppur si muove.
Armande Bejart.
Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.
An illiterate, underbred book.
Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses.
I can’t even pronounce the filthy thing.
Said Wallace Stevens of the word womb in a poem.
All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily.
Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.
How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above?
Tony Trollope, he was naturally called.
Madeleine Grey. The Chants d’Auvergne.
Why is it never part of Reader’s active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg?
Though Homer insists she was mortal.
Aquinas knew almost nothing about history.
Maigret.
Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist’s sense of his aloneness?
Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone?
Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.
But in either event had put on a clean shirt first.
Menin aei’de, tbea.
George Gissing’s first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad.
No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical?
I am completely alone here now?
Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war.
Says Burton in the Anatomy.
Impoverished and freezing, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night knock.
Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite.
The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.
Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy’s mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot.
Protagonist is completely alone here now.
Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.
102 Boulevard Haussman.
Even on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded.
Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.
Ananda. Having been Buddha’s cousin, as well as his favorite pupil.
The Gulf of Spezia.
Masaccio died at twenty-seven. So suddenly that poison was not unsuspected, Vasari says.
The eulogy at Puccini’s funeral was delivered by Benito Mussolini.
November 9, 1953. St. Vincent’s Hospital, Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, New York.
Acute alcoholic insult to the brain.
Taliesin.
Willem de Kooning lived as an illegal immigrant for his first thirty years in the United States.
On one of Reader’s windowsills: framed photographs of his son and daughter, a scuffed baseball, a sunbleached knotted root plucked from the Ebro.
Poe was expelled from West Point for refusing to obey military orders. Later, James McNeill Whistler would fail there academically.
Why is it commonly referred to as the Arnolfini Marriage, or even the Arnolfini Betrothal, when she is seven months pregnant?
Im Westen Nichts Neues.
Decades afterward, locked indelibly in Reader’s mind: the last two pages of Good Morning, Midnight
Ernest Hemingway was an anti-Semite.
Ingenious nonsense, Isaac Newton dismissed poetry as.
Fernande Olivier.
Dora Maar.
Marie-Therese Walter.
Olga Koklova.
Françoise Gilot.
Jacqueline Roque.
Rabelais: As for you, little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny Critics, you’ll soon have railed your last: Go hang yourselves.
A one-legged woman, in a conspicuously short skirt, manipulating swiftly on crutches along a crowded street.
Why does Reader still recall having noticed her, quite some few years ago now in fact, and even somewhat distantly?
On the actual night before her wedding, Edith Wharton had no idea of the facts of life.
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go.
There is no mention of Ockham’s Razor in anything Ock-ham ever wrote.
Protagonist walking the beach, probably every day, at water’s edge.
Oddly, Reader for the moment viewing him particularly in harsh weather, huddled against winds.
Snow in patches.
Wittgenstein was cited for bravery three times during World War I.
Fighting against the Allies.
Goat song.
How frequently would the women make use of that main upper section of the house in winter?
What sort of heating arrangement does Protagonist have?
Nelson Algren, not Sartre, gave Simone de Beauvoir her first orgasm.
The interminable recitations on the part of the dying in the Iliad, even as they are being literally disemboweled.
Then again Reader has also loved opera.
Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the border between France and Spain in 1940.