Juan de Yepes.
Louise Colet’s affair with Flaubert. Louise Colet’s affair with Musset. Louise Colet’s affair with Cousin. Louise Colet’s affair with Vigny.
And cetera.
the year is full of unforseen happenings
and the time of earthquakes is at hand
An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.
Rousseau was an anti-Semite.
And/or in harsh weather? Huddled against winds? Snow in patches, Reader again sees.
Max Beckmann died of a heart attack while strolling in Central Park in Manhattan.
Praxiteles’ mistress/model Phryne was once on the verge of being convicted of impiety. It appears factual that the orator Hyperides, defending her, signaled for her to bare her bosom.
And won acquittal.
At Amherst, ca. 1880:
Emily, you wretch! None of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.
Mai Zetterling.
Ypres.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Gestapo.
In his Beheading of John the Baptist,Caravaggio spells out his name in some of the Baptist’s spilled blood at the lower edge of the canvas. Otherwise he signed no paintings.
All ages are contemporaneous.
Dante married a woman named Gemma Donati at eighteen or twenty after a formal family betrothal of years earlier. For all his repeated use of autobiography, he makes no single reference to her anywhere.
Gaudeamus igitur.
Are there two women upstairs, or more?
Even without seeing them come and go, conscious instantly of the first footfalls.
If to no other end, surely accentuating the isolation?
P
ier Paolo Pasolini was murdered.
Dino Campana died mad.
Paul Feyerabend was crippled from a wound as a German officer on the Russian front in World War II.
Narciso Yepes.
Protagonist kept company by chipmunks? By field mice? By the gulls?
Isocrates committed suicide by starving himself.
Living in slums, literally pawning clothes to buy food, at times Karl Marx could not afford paper to write on. Between 1850 and 1855 three of his children died. For one he had to beg a loan for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken was an anti-Semite.
Qumran.
Samuel Beckett was the best man at the wedding of Joyce’s grandson Stephen.
I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.
The same Antony who covered Brutus’s body with his own robe at Philippi had had Cicero’s head and right hand nailed up in the Forum only a year before.
Michelangelo Merisi.
Is there such a word as grueif Nelson Goodman invented it to illustrate a philosophic point but it has no other application beyond that classroom context whatsoever?
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Panem et circenses.
Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself in a garage.
Women at the time of Troy wore only a single garment. Which is to say, no underclothing.
And did not bathe with any frequency.
John Bunyan wrote the better part of Pilgrim’s Progresswhile in jail for illegal preaching.
One kid, one kid, that father bought for two zuzim.
Should it be at least three years since Protagonist has been involved with a woman? Longer?
Why would he have become involved with no one since?
Or does the withdrawal obviously feed on itself and increasingly preclude even the chance of meeting someone to start with?
Helen unwashed? Andromache?
Moritz Schlick was shot and killed on the steps of the university library in Vienna by a student whose thesis he had failed.
Conchita Supervia died in childbirth.
Etienne Joseph Theophile Thore.
Who resurrected Vermeer after two full centuries of disregard.
Jules Bastien-Lepage.
For whom Reader can still sometimes be the fool.
Mill was reading Plato at seven. In Greek.
Heraclitus once had himself buried in cow dung when ill. For purposes of drawing out the fluids of dropsy, Diogenes Laertius says.
Grace Moore died in a plane crash.
Niels Lyhne.Which Joyce, Ibsen, Hesse, Mann, Strindberg, Rilke, Freud, were all profound admirers of. Rilke calling all of Jacobsen’s work as indispensable to him as the Bible.
Kilgore, Texas.
If indeed three or four years, will Protagonist have at least begun to become accustomed to the solitude?
Accustomed, or wearily acquiescent, does Reader mean?
I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.
Handel, born in central Germany, is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Henry Fielding is buried in Portugal.
Sophocles and Herodotus were intimate friends.
Solange Raytchine.
Attorney Generaclass="underline" So then it is for the labour of two days that you ask a fee of two hundred guineas?
Whistler: No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.
When Queen Christina of Sweden hired Descartes as a personal philosophy tutor in 1649, she dispatched a warship under a full admiral to convey him to Stockholm.
But then demanded daily instruction at 5 A.M. in the Scandinavian winter. Descartes caught pneumonia and died.
Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, and Edvard Munch all did portraits of Mallarmé.
Gurre-Lieder.
Frederick Delius was paralyzed and blinded by syphilis.
Tradition says that Saint Paul was decapitated.
John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow.
Sir James Frazer spent as many as fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at his desk at Cambridge. Throughout his life. It eventually cost him his eyesight.
What sort of bargain can Reader turn Protagonist into if he does allow him to meet someone?
How little money does he in fact live on?
Would he even be able to pick up a dinner check for two people at a respectable restaurant?