Where Aeneas visited it. Northwest of Naples.
Johan Emanuel Schikaneder.
Spatial Form in Modern Literature.
Protagonist’s friends. From that life that was.
And among those who had moved to distant places and one had gradually ceased to hear from even then?
At Protagonist’s age, how long before one begins to suspect that some of them, also, are even now dead?
We are now able to suggest an explanation for the proverb There are many Manii in Aricia.
Hemingway: I just called to tell you I got that thing.
General Buck Lanham: That thing? What thing?
Hemingway: That Swedish thing, you know?
That Swedish thing. The Nobel Prize for Horses’ Backsides.
Voltaire was illegitimate.
Late in her career, Kirsten Flagstad recorded a Tristan und Isoldein which the high Cs she had been missing repeatedly on stage were all reached magnificently.
Having been sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and dubbed in.
August Heat.
At Protagonist’s age, how long before one realizes that more of the people one had ever known anywhere are in fact now dead than alive?
Mary Powell.
Katherine Woodcock.
Elizabeth Minshull.
A title for all this, has Reader by chance yet given any thought to?
Thomas Heggen committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.
Tess Durbeyfield.
Mr. Flood’s Party?
Not Waving but Drowning?
The Shrine of the Little Flower. Royal Oak, Michigan.
The Temptation to Exist?
In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God’s retribution against England for harboring an atheist such as Thomas Hobbes.
Who played tennis until he was seventy-five.
Jung was an anti-Semite.
Antony threw himself on his sword after the defeat at Actium and the subsequent desertion of most of his troops.
Go faster, Jesus, why dost thou linger?
I indeed am going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.
Right Views.
Right Intentions.
Right Speech.
Right Conduct.
Right Livelihood.
Right Effort.
Right Remembrance.
Right Contemplation.
Avicenna studied Aristotle’s Metaphysicsso exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally fully understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.
Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three.
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Now and again, an image, still, flitting into Protagonist’s consciousness? Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ravel’s La Valse?
At thirty-nine, when his first wife died, Monet was so poverty-stricken he could not afford the few centimes to redeem a pawned locket that he knew she wished to be buried with, and had to borrow.
Heifetz was playing the Mendelssohn E minor concerto by the age of six.
Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.
More than one owner of a significant personal library, in the early years after Gutenberg, made it plain that no printedvolume would ever be a part of it.
The Timesof London officially listed Robert Graves as killed in action in 1916.
Graves would live until 1985.
Ella Sagersdorf.
For most of his life, Beethoven changed addresses on an average of more than twice a year.
And was more than once sued by landlords for having scribbled notations all over his walls.
All men by nature desire to know.
Krakatoa.
Eliot was sixty-eight when he married his second wife Valerie. Who was thirty.
Du musst dein Leben andern.
Leigh Hunt once went to jail for libel.
Virginia Hill committed suicide.
Concierto de Aranjuez.
You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody’s lonely.
Xerxes, invading Greece, halted at the site of Troy in homage to its heroes. Looking on the Trojan War as a European invasion of Asia which justified Persia’s own present aggression.
Seven centuries afterward.
Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.
Là ci darem la mano.
How is Protagonist’s eyesight?
Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari’s story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.
Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?
Even if only from a good number of years back?
The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.
Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.
Arshile Gorky hanged himself.
Initially, the word metaphysicsmeant only that which came behindthe Physicsin the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.
Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find Leviathanselling, secondhand, for four times its original price:
It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.
Gidon Kremer.
For Protagonist’s literary past:
Protagonist: Isn’t it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies’ room?