Nonetheless.
Clinamen. Tessera. Kenosis.
Abednego.
Coleman Dowell committed suicide in a leap from a balcony.
As of 1994, after its restoration, seventeen of the draped figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgmentremained so. Presumably this time for curatorial reasons only, however.
Raskolnikov has come to this place. Bloom has come to this place. Rieux has come to this place.
Long hence, perhaps, Diotima,
I shall see you here.
Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh.
Vanishing point.
Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives.
Never meeting.
Mycenae.
As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.
Sergei Esenin was an anti-Semite.
Kierkegaard was probably impotent.
Miss J. Hunter Dunn.
Longfellow’s first wife died young. The second, mother of grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair, was burned to death when her clothing caught fire while she was melting sealing wax.
The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as peaceful.
Robert Desnos, who had been tortured by the Gestapo for working with the French Resistance, survived periods in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But died of typhus just as the camps were being liberated.
Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan!
James Leo Herlihy committed suicide with sleeping pills.
The Martello tower at Sandycove is near Dalkey. Which is adjacent to Sallynoggin.
Horse Badorties.
A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.
Confusing one’s mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.
Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.
Vico Road.
La Vestalewas Napoleon’s favorite opera.
There is no such thing as literal meaning.
There is no such thing as intrinsic merit.
Fish and guests in three days are stale, says Lyly in Euphues.
El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.
Walter Slezak committed suicide.
One of Shelley’s grandfathers was born in New Jersey.
Tall but pot-bellied, Chaucer describes himself as.
Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite.
And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.
De Kooning: Some guy came into my studio for fifteen minutes and wrote something it took six hours to read.
Belmonte. Joselito. Manolete. Dominguin.
Ilse Koch.
Otto Weininger shot himself.
For Protagonist’s less distant literary past:
Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you’ve been up to.
Protagonist: You’ll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I’m going to have?
Barthelme: Talk. And then I’ll tell you about my throat cancer.
Gondal. Angria.
Andrea del Sarto was sometimes hired to paint the equivalent of wanted posters on the walls of Florentine buildings.
As were Andrea del Castagno and Botticelli.
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
Virgil died in 19 B.C. Augustine is but one of many who appear to have sincerely believed that his fourth eclogue, which talks of the birth of a divine child, prophesied the coming of Christ.
Medieval legend would add that Saint Paul wept at his tomb for not having had an opportunity to convert him.
Caligula and his sister.
The line Les lauriers sont coupesis from a verse by Theodore de Banville.
Who filched it from an old nursery rhyme.
John Marston complained mockingly about the excessive scholarly allusions in the work of his Elizabethan contemporaries. Though proving readily able to refer to the most common current sources himself while doing so, including Vencenzo Cartari, Natale Conti, and Jean Tixier de Ravisi.
Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?
In 1985, in 653 at bats, Wade Boggs swung and missed at a first pitch exactly once.
One of Gottfried Benn’s wives committed suicide.
So did one of his mistresses.
Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat.
And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death.
Unlike the case with the Metaphysics,the title of the Nicomachean Ethicscame from either its editor’s name, or its dedicatee’s. One or both having been Aristotle’s son. Nicomachus.
Brundisium.
Dear Sir, — I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
John Clare
Cato the Younger committed suicide with a dagger. He spent the night before contemplating Socrates’ death in the Phaedo.
Protagonist has had surgery for cancer twice?
Protagonist has prostate cancer still, but it is for the moment under control?
Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandydid not last.
Said Johnson.
Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding.
All of Heinrich Heine was banned by the Nazis. When something like Die Loreleirefused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.