Tchaikovsky died of cholera, in St. Petersburg, after drinking tap water that had not been boiled.
Among Protagonist’s cartons, several containing phonograph records rather than books.
Lorine Niedecker spent years of her adult life scrubbing floors in a Wisconsin hospital.
Names of the dead.
A lifelong rumor insisted that Guillaume Apollinaire was the son of a cardinal, or even of the Pope. His mother’s father had been a ranking officer in the Papal Guard.
The Second Commandment was taken so literally in the Lithuanian ghetto when Chaim Soutine was a boy that he was physically beaten when he tried to draw.
The graves of strangers.
Martin Heidegger was an anti-Semite.
Who kept a portrait of Pascal in his study. While signing his letters Heil Hitler.
Maya Lin.
John Berryman committed suicide at fifty-seven by jumping from a bridge. Forty-five years earlier his father had shot himself outside Berryman’s window.
Horace dictated that a writer should set aside a finished poem for nine years. And only then decide if it is worth publishing.
A block or two past the grocery, where the neighborhood declines into even more evident abandonment, is a dingy saloon frequented only by a remnant of elderly men. The television, if on, is tuned only to sports events. No one intrudes if Protagonist sits wordlessly with a single drink. He does not go often in any case.
Soutine was in fact once beaten so badly for sketching someone’s portrait that he was able to collect damages.
And used the money to leave his village and attend art school.
Catherine Blake: I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.
Exit, pursued by a bear.
Berryman’s name was originally John Smith. He adopted his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried.
Walt Whitman more than once wrote anonymous favorable reviews of his own work.
Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalen who did the dishes at the Last Supper.
Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.
Meursault is fairly sure it was no one from the saloon or the restaurant who nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.
Toynbee finds more than twice as many civilizations in history than Spengler did.
Mina Loy.
Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother became hysterical at the approach of the Spanish Armada.
Legend says Virgil was born in a ditch.
Protagonist has not quite enough money to get by on. Or rather he has just enough, now. Even with extreme frugality he is eating into it, however.
So that it diminishes steadily.
Toward a logical inevitability that he does his best not to think about.
Jean-Baptiste Lully died from gangrene after stabbing himself with a baton while conducting.
Mantua me genuit.
Picasso, when told that Gertrude Stein did not look like her portrait:
Never mind. She will.
Except for fragments quoted by others, everything of Menander’s disappeared utterly in the Dark Ages. A first complete play was not discovered until excavations in Egypt during Reader’s own lifetime.
Eliot was a virgin until his marriage at twenty-six. And possibly thereafter.
Erasmus was illegitimate.
Will Protagonist have sold any of his books before moving? Could he be selling some of them now, piecemeal, as it were for pocket money?
Would Reader?
H. L. Mencken called Lizette Woodworth Reese the finest American poet of his time.
Sergei Esenin committed suicide in a Moscow hotel by hanging himself with a strap from a suitcase.
John Everett Millais once painted advertisements for Pears Soap.
Why does Reader rarely remember that the Septuagint is so called because seventy scholars allegedly translated it from Hebrew into Greek in seventy-two days?
Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace. Layamon. Marie de France. Chretien de Troyes. Malory.
Nora Barnacle was a hotel chambermaid when Joyce met her.
Eva Hesse was dead of a brain tumor at thirty-four.
When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold at bankruptcy in 1656, they included paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, and van Eyck. And seventy-five Rembrandts.
And did not bring in enough to discharge the bankruptcy.
Theodore Dreiser was an anti-Semite.
Bathsheba Everdene.
Lidice.
The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.
Said Einstein.
Inside the basement section of the house at the dunes, a stairway climbs to the floor above. Because of the subdivision, the entrance at the top of the stairs has been sealed. In effect, the stairs now mount to nowhere.
Protagonist has set up the first of his unpacked books on some of the steps.
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
Georges Braque came extremely close to losing his sight from a head wound in World War I.
Or perhaps not a novel?
Is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?
Reader and his mind full of clutter?
No one can steal my words. These are the words of Theognis.
Should Reader bring in the most recent woman in Protagonist’s life?
From how long ago?
Does the end of that relationship have anything to do with the declension into now?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide.
Sparafucile.
Assuming sufficient time, why will Protagonist have become involved with no one since?
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Shut up, he explained.
Byron was only thirty-six when he died, yet had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth.
Nonetheless every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.
Moses Maimonides wrote in Arabic.
Lullaby. One Autumn Night.
Blessed Mary went a-walking.