Our life is but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.
Said Marcus Aurelius.
A year before his death, already ill and with his recent work finding rejection, Baudelaire was shown essays eulogizing him by two poets in their early twenties. Neither of them had yet produced a book of his own, making their names meaningless.
Paul Verlaine. Stephane Mallarme.
Chaucer’s father was a vitner.
Pasternak’s popularity was such that if he stumbled over a line while reciting, most of his Moscow audience was generally able to prompt him from memory.
Franz Sussmayr. The D Minor Requiem.
Michelangelo finished The Last Judgment in 1541. Fourteen years later Pope Paul IV ordered Daniele da Volterra to drape forty of the naked figures.
Which Salvator Rosa would subsequently suggest made the whole wall look like a public bath.
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates.
7 Eccles Street.
The Carmina Burana. Any and all names of the original vagabond thirteenth-century poets long forgotten.
The soprano arias in the Cour d’Amour section can fill Reader with heartache.
The soprano arias in the Cour d*Amour section can fill Protagonist with heartache?
Poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray. Cartons heaped and piled.
Pausing among the graves.
Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.
Boccaccio was illegitimate. And had five illegitimate children of his own by several mistresses.
Repentant in later life, regretting even having written The Decameron, he contemplated taking Holy Orders.
But permitted himself to be talked out of this by Petrarch.
Sweet the nails, sweet the wood,
Which bore so sweet a burden.
In truth Protagonist has also come to this place because he can live infinitely more cheaply here.
Hannah Senesch.
Carl Orff was an anti-Semite.
Henry James paid for lessons to ride a bicycle.
Then we will have Homer and Don Quixote, and then we will have saunter and chat, and one more laugh before we die.
Said William Cowper, who was mad through most of his life.
Escaping after the German invasion of France, at seventy, Heinrich Mann crossed the Pyrenees on foot.
Ellen Ternan. Ellen Terry.
A one-word inquiry Reader discovers on a note sheet, its meaning now lost to him completely: Dead?
Yukio Mishima committed suicide samurai-style.
Having first arranged to be instantly beheaded thereafter.
Kawabata committed suicide also.
Goliards.
Giotto’s portrait of Dante, a reproduction of which tilts on a shelf beside Reader’s desk, was probably painted after Dante died. Nonetheless it is the only one by someone who knew him.
One does not finish a poem, one only abandons it.
Patience, and shuffle the cards.
An equally inexplicable similar sheet: She?
Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Rudolf Eucken. Frans Sillanpaa. Verner von Heidenstam. Halldor Laxness. Pearl Buck. Karl Gjellerup.
Toni Morrison.
Because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die.
Wallace Stevens was an anti-Semite.
Tevya der Milchiger.
Names for Protagonist’s children? If such?
Whereabouts? If known?
Suzette Gontard, who became the Diotima of Holderlin’s Hyperion after their few years of clandestine trysts, died in 1802. Holderlin lived on until 1843.
Ah, my Diotima, thirteen sons she bore me. One is the Pope, another is the Sultan, a third is Emperor of Russia.
May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?
No, it did lots of other things too.
Augustine vehemently condemned all study except the Scriptures. Which is to say no natural science, no philosophy, no poetry.
But acknowledged weeping at the death of Dido in the Aeneid.
Mawrdew Czgowchwz.
Has it been convincingly established that Sylvia Plath did not expect her suicide to be successful?
Brunetto Latini. At Dante’s right in the Giotto fresco.
Jacqueline du Pre, who did not play Bach every morning for seventy years.
But was found to have multiple sclerosis at twenty-seven.
Does Reader still possess recordings?
Weldon Kees committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Presumably. His car was at the site, though his body was never recovered.
How old is Hamlet?
If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.
Said Emily Bronte, an hour before her death.
December 19, 1848.
A Tuesday.
You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico.
The two small rough orange stones beside the Dante portrait are from Masada. Once brought to Reader as a souvenir by his daughter.
The original Diotima was a presumably legendary priestess said to have been Socrates’ teacher. In the Symposium Plato lets her voice his metaphysic of love. There would appear to be no other classical references to her.
Eliot was an anti-Semite.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
Ariosto wrote fifty-six versions of the opening of Orlando Furioso.
A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.
Dead?
She?
Charles V once bent and picked up a paintbrush that Titian had dropped, at the time an extraordinary gesture of respect for an artist.
Convinced he was being poisoned, Osip Mandelstam may have sometimes stolen food from other inmates in his Soviet prison camp. And been beaten for it. At the end he survived on scraps from a garbage heap.
Twice, Remedios Varo lived with two lovers at the same time.
Along the beach beyond the dimes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.
A French word for such, is Reader trying to recall?
A young child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.
Verweihle doch, du hist so schön.
Fray Bernardino de Sahagun.
Lemmings from Norway have been reported to migrate to a particular area in the Atlantic and then swim in circles until they drown. Flocks of birds have gone to their deaths in the same spot. Is archaic instinct drawing them back to Atlantis?