Ralph Roister-Doister.
It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Our sister, death.
Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that Protagonist can fathom.
Or are some few of the graves more recent?
Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.
When Ovid was banished from Rome, it was to Tomi, on the Black Sea.
Would Reader have otherwise ever heard of a city in Romania now called Constanta?
Anne Bradstreet’s first home in Massachusetts, a decade after the Mayflower,was at what later would become Harvard Square.
Aesop was a slave. Terence was a slave. Epictetus was a slave.
Protagonist watching the woman who appears?
After a time, finding himself waiting for her almost unwittingly?
Helen Frankenthaler Motherwell, her name legally once was.
Frederic Chopin was an anti-Semite.
Madame,
If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together.
Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum.
Someone will call. Surely someone will call.
Aristotle’s may have been the first purely private library.
At forty-six, after an illness, Goya suddenly turned stone deaf.
How long can Reader deal with Protagonist’s isolation without explaining his background?
How conceivable is it for the emptiness to simply exist?
L’Être et le Néant.
Blaise Cendrars lost an arm in World War I. As did one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers, a concert pianist.
Lice in the locks of literature, Tennyson called critics.
Or will the question persist? Why does Protagonist have no life?
Having written books of his own, would he have known other writers?
Does he not, now?
After Anne Sexton turned on her car’s engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting.
Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen.
Twenty-three hundred years ago.
Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
The woman at the grave.
Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written.
I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.
June 22, 1633:
With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me.
Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.
Where would Protagonist’s son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them?
Will he?
Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute’s Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.
Eppur si muove.
Armande Bejart.
Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peacein longhand seven times.
An illiterate, underbred book.
Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses.
I can’t even pronounce the filthy thing.
Said Wallace Stevens of the word wombin a poem.
All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily.
Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.
How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above?
Tony Trollope, he was naturally called.
Madeleine Grey. The Chants d’Auvergne.
Why is it never part of Reader’s active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg?
Though Homer insists she was mortal.
Aquinas knew almost nothing about history.
Maigret.
Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist’s sense of his aloneness?
Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone?
Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.
But in either event had put on a clean shirt first.
Menin aei’de, tbea.
George Gissing’s first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad.
No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical?
I am completely alone here now?
Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war.
Says Burton in the Anatomy.
Impoverished and freezing, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night knock.
Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite.
The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.
Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy’s mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot.
Protagonist is completely alone here now.
Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.
102 Boulevard Haussman.
Even on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded.
Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.