James Russell Lowell was Virginia Woolf s.
Maurice Ravel died of a brain tumor.
Will Protagonist have spent time in Italy?
In Mexico?
At seventeen, when she became Abelard’s pupil, Heloise was already fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years.
And made uncountable revisions in the proof sheets of each.
Thomas Wolfe was an anti-Semite.
Robinson Crusoe is on his island for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days.
Fray Luis de Leon.
Would Protagonist’s son or daughter one day want his books?
Thackeray’s wife was insane. But was cared for in a private home rather than an institution.
Judah Halevi.
Bitter Honeymoon.
Ella Ferris Pell was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Her Salome.
Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbriick. Birkenau. Belzec. Theresienstadt.
There is no verifiable portrait of Jane Austen.
An otherwise anonymous Madame Delphine Delamare, who after numerous adulteries as the wife of an inattentive country doctor committed suicide with poison in 1850.
And became the model for Emma Bovary.
I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name.
And Buchenwald. Six miles from Weimar. On what had been a pleasant wooded hillside.
The more significant women in Protagonist’s life?
Once, obviously, more of an existence than his books and the headstones of strangers.
Children depart, miscellaneous relationships wither. Friends move to distant places.
Friends die.
Salman Rushdie lost the tip of one of his fingers as a boy. As does a character in Midnight’s Children.
Tolstoy was twice cited for bravery as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus.
And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died.
Of starvation and typhus.
God wrote the book. I took his dictation.
Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.
Non amo te, Sabidi.
Does a lone woman walk the beach, perhaps, and with a certain regularity, as Reader visualizes one visiting at one of the graves?
A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Du-plessis, who was dead at twenty-three.
And became the model for La Dame anx Camelias.
Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.
Molloy. Malone. Estragon.
Simonetta Vespucci. Who was painted by Piero di Cosimo. And one of whose relatives the Americas are named after.
Ilya Ilych Oblomov.
D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin’s purges.
Sempre libera.
The question of truth versus legend in Alexander’s having razed Persepolis at the bidding of Thais.
The fair certainty that excessive wine played a part.
Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.
Maribarbola and Nicolasito.
Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.
One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.
And that Alexander was born on the same night.
Adrienne Monnier committed suicide.
Where Reader more broadly sees the cemetery is in a town that in its entirety is comprised of little other than those shoddy small brick row houses and fissured streets. And would seem as if perpetually guised in winter light.
A difficulty, however, being that Reader senses he is evoking the image from half a century or more ago. Where such today?
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Take courage, Charlotte.
Said Anne, dying only six months after Emily.
Back to the things themselves.
The baseball on Reader’s windowsill was hit foul by Ted Williams at Yankee Stadium. Also in antiquity. Reader was with a girl named Fern Winters when it ricocheted off a concrete step and the arm of a seat directly to him.
Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of their time.
Is Reader perhaps recalling older neighborhoods in certain middling Hudson River towns like Kingston or Catskill or Saugerties, which in those days he knew slightly?
Bucephalas.
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?
Thomas Traherne died in 1674. The manuscripts of his poems, never before published, were come upon on a bookseller’s cart in 1897.
Also in part a commonplace book?
Also in part a cento, as Burton would surely have had it?
The criminality at Aulis.
Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of The Unquiet Grave?
A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said.
Lucian Freud was once married to Jacob Epstein’s daughter. And once to a woman who later married Robert Lowell.
The saints have their own country.
Said Pascal.
In an apartment far west in Greenwich Village. Heat. Molloy/Malone/Estragon sorting books and records, determining which he may dispose of before departing after all.
Elizabeth Siddal died from an overdose of laudanum, very probably a suicide.
Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.
There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me.
Il Libro dell’ Arte.
Della Pittura.