Reader's Block

Confusing one’s mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.

Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.

Vico Road.

La Vestale was 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 coupes is 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 Ethics came 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 Shandy did 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 Lorelei refused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.

Joyce died of a perforated ulcer.

Herrenvolk.

Naphtali Herz Imber.

The foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Thus Mark Twain on Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

Whose fingertips rest almost unwittingly at her groin.

For whatever aesthete’s reasons, Rilke could not be troubled to attend his own daughter’s wedding.

As a boy, Dmitri Shostakovich played the piano in theaters showing silent movies.

As did Protagonist’s mother, at approximately the same date in time.

In Kingston, New York.

Catherine Tekakwitha.

Richard Tucker was once a cantor in Brooklyn.

The greatest music critic who ever lived, Auden called Shaw.

Galgenlieder.

Jean Genet was an anti-Semite.

Elpenor. Whom Odysseus forgot to bury.

Palinurus. Whom Aeneas remembered to.

Drusilla.

Would Reader look at the skull beside his desk differently if he decided it was a woman’s?

Protagonist has it. On a windowsill. On the windowsill of the window that looks out onto the graves.

Et in Arcadia ego.

King Saul committed suicide.

Every Man desires to live long; but no Man would be old. Said Swift.

Isaac Newton was idiosyncratic enough to say no when Voltaire wanted to meet him. And again with Benjamin Franklin.

How Beautiful with Shoes.

Akhmatova, in Leningrad, her son in prison, waiting in line daily, in the hope of at least being allowed to pass in a parcel. Can you put this into words? And I said: I can.

John Berryman:

Rilke was a jerk.

Margo Adams.

Concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing.

Said Raymond Chandler.

Garbo with no eyebrows?

Cal Lowell.

One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

John Davidson drowned himself.

Simeon Solomon died in a workhouse.

Did ever a woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Protagonist has also had cataract surgery?

Gretcben am Spinnrade.

Picasso had two children in his late sixties.

It is patently more sensible, in this workaday world, to be a James Jones than a James Joyce. Said Protagonist’s father.

Mussorgsky was an anti-Semite.

The Sallynoggin Archive.

Norma Jean Baker committed suicide.

The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

The eschatology of the still white stones in snow.

Is there a woman again after all?

Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.

Alborak.

A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.

Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.

Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.

The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.

For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5 A.M. to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.

A big book, a big evil.

Said Callimachus.

During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.

Who had once been his pupil.

At Alexandria.

The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.

Sappho with white hair?

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Said Barnett Newman.

What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?

Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.

Leonora Carrington was a better painter.

Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!

Capodistria.

The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.

Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.

Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.

Boadicea committed suicide with poison.

Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?

Reader and this notion of his.

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other’s clothing.

And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey’s phrase.

Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.

A recording of Bella figlia deWamore, with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.

Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.

Hugo de Sade. S

imon de’ Bardi.

Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.

But then named Pylon and Sanctuary as the best of his books.

Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.

The identities of their ultimate defeats.

Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.

A. E. Ellis was who?

Harold Patrick Reiser.

Carrying groceries, a newspaper, an inexpensive bottle of wine. Protagonist evading splattered slush from passing vehicles at the highway.

Then along the barely discernable path to the room that had once been a garage at the rear of the less than beguiling house.

Room, or rooms?

Conrad Aiken’s father shot his wife and then himself. Leaving it to Aiken, at eleven, to climb a flight of stairs after hearing the shots and walk in on the bodies.

Katherine Anne Porter was an anti-Semite.

Lady Caroline Lamb.

Annabella Milbanke.

Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford.

Augusta Leigh.

Claire Clairmont.

Marianna Segati.

Margarita Cogni.

Teresa Guiccioli.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was so depressed at the failure of his first symphony that he gave up composing. And had to undergo hypnosis to start again.

D. H. Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.

Henry Moore’s father likewise.

Much as the Nazis tried to make use of him, Nietzsche had in fact referred to earlier German anti-Semitism as both damnable and poisonous.

Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French, not English. Godot does not verbally suggest Dieu.

Laura and Beatrice. The latter having died at twenty-four.

A woman kneeling at a grave. A woman walking on a beach.

Der Tod und das Madchen.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

He is completely alone here now.

Memento mori.

Emmanuel Ringelblum and his wife and young son were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Some of his Notes had been buried in milk cans.

Jane Ellen Harrison.

Courbet’s Sleeping Women.

Bernard Buffet’s Sleeping Women.

The Knave of Sceptres, Reversed: 111 News, Displeasure, Chagrin, Worry.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this world. Said Aquinas.

Skokie, Illinois.

Missolonghi.

Jacqueline Picasso shot herself.

For Protagonist’s again distant literary past:

Malcolm Lowry: I have a funny story to tell you, about something that happened while you were out.

Protagonist: Happened? Oh, damn, I can smell it all over the apartment. You didn’t drink my shaving lotion?

Courbet’s Origin of the World.

Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation.

Said Frost.

Philip Larkin was an anti-Semite.

Areopagitica.

Heiligenstadt.

He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.

Francis William Bourdillon. Edward Rowland Sill. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Winifred M. Letts.

Carel Fabritius was killed at thirty-two in a gunpowder depot explosion.

Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?

Photographs of anyone other than his children, are there?

Are there manuscripts?

Pliny the Elder died of asphyxiation after landing a boat to get a closer view of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Fritz Wunderlich died in a fall down a flight of stairs.

Is there a typewriter?

John Heminges and Henry Condell.

And why has Reader only this tardily determined that Protagonist will have had five or six books dedicated to him in that other incarnation also?

Even if he will not be certain he has copies of all of these in among his cartons any longer.

I think: Is it the blue dressing gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out — it’s very important.

Parmigianino died mad.

Anactoria.

Alan Ladd committed suicide.

My younger and shallower and vainer brother, William James spoke of Henry as.

So worthy a friend.

Chaucer was an anti-Semite.

Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.

Three.

Zinka Milanov. The Nile aria.

Christopher Caudwell was killed while covering a Loyalist retreat at the Jarama River in 1937. On his first day in combat.

Paideia.

Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:

What is he doing underground, that idiot?

Henri Heine, he was naturally called in his decades in Paris.

Kneeling at a grave. Walking a beach.

Eternal devotion beside the point, after Beatrice’s death Dante had at least four children by the never-spoken-of Gemma Donati.

James Joyce’s daughter.

A forty-year-old Olympia portable, in fact. Not even electric.

Modeled after whose?

Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.

And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.

Where in a masterpiece of spiting one’s face he starved himself to death.

Who’s the coon?

Asked Wallace Stevens re a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir.

Gala Eluard, who became Gala Dali. Her affair with Max Ernst. Her affair with Giorgio de Chirico. And cetera, when married or otherwise.

When was the last time Protagonist actually did sit down to a full meal at a better restaurant?

When was the last time he let himself hail a taxi?

Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite.

Máquina de escribir.

Machine à écrire.

Macchina da scrivere.

Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.

Josef Mengele, M.D.

John Gould Fletcher drowned himself.

Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.

O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In a lawsuit that prevented him from teaching in New York in 1940, Bertrand Russell’s writings were described as lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. Unquote.

May, 1886:

Little cousins,

Called back.

Emily

Vladimir Mayakovsky had an illegitimate daughter in the United States.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.

Schreibmaschine.

When was the last time Protagonist took a trip? Simply went somewhere?

Principia Mathematica. Logic and Knowledge. The Analysis of Mind. The Analysis of Matter.

And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold.

Tolstoy thought King Lear so bad a play as to be not worth discussion.

Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Is it evident to Reader that he has lost interest in the idea of doing anything with the women upstairs?

Do you know that the king had not even heard of Wittgenstein!

Brahms died of cancer of the liver.

Why do you always wear black?

I am in mourning for my life.

There was once an actual portrait of Petrarch’s Laura, by Simone Martini. However it is long lost.

Within two years of Stephen Crane’s death in the Black Forest, Cora had returned to Jacksonville and opened a brothel.

Beyond the dunes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

William the Conqueror came before Richard III. Announced Shakespeare through a dark window to Burbage.

Carlos Arruza died in a car crash.

In one of Protagonist’s own unread books, perhaps? Why does Reader think of him sensing he should remember something about someone else who often walked along a beach?

Teresa Stich-Randall.

Regine Olsen.

Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite.

All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil, an Ezra nicety.

Protagonist the Penniless. Protagonist the Hermit.

Deus vult?

Bachelard. Baudrillard. Blanchot. Barthes. Bataille.

Sorting, packing.

Toward what final bleak contemplation amid the disarray?

I have read Mr. Scott’s book fourteen times; and it is a rather tiresome book.

Said someone of The Architecture of Humanism.

Condorcet probably committed suicide.

The first writer known to condemn slavery is Euripides.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

If forced to choose, Reader assumes, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Giacometti.

September 28, 1891, 12:30 A.M. 104 East 26th Street, New York. Cardiac dilatation, mitral regurgitation, contributing asthenia.

Melville.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.

Why is virtually all landscape in Andrea Mantegna comprised of rock?

How many times had Reader heard the Smetana before he discovered that the Moldau was a river?

Among the Ouses and the Ebros in Anna Livia Plurabelle.

One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.

Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein was born in.

Among the Meuses and the Marnes.

Allen Mandelbaum’s Aeneid. Mackail’s.

La Pasionaria.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Jane Austen. Anne Bradstreet. Cervantes.

Pierre Menard.

Or actually some few with certain other writers at that? In antique five-and-ten-cent store frames?

And everyone young?

Cicero was an anti-Semite.

Certain legends would insist that Pontius Pilate committed suicide.

In last year’s nests there are no birds this year.

The beach, or the cemetery?

What follows for Protagonist in either case?

Patron saint of desperate causes?

In a dramatic and not narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Still, for all slips of hers,

One of Eve’s family—

Wipe those poor lips of hers

Oozing so clammily.

Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.

Hearing of acquaintances who have died, alone, to be found by strangers.

According to indictments of the time, on May 23, 1450, Sir Thomas Malory raped the wife, Joan, of one Hugh Smyth, in Warwickshire.

On August 6, Malory raped said Joan again.

Joyce called How Much Land Does a Man Need? the greatest of all short stories.

Gaspara Stampa. Mihri Hatun. Louise Labé.

I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Quelqu’un vit sur cetteplage.

Alguien vive en este play a.

The end of his life in a shabby furnished room across the street from the railroad station in Frankfurt. Oskar Schindler.

Bernard Berenson was an anti-Semite.

Bernard Berenson was born a Jew.

Character! What is character! It’s tone that matters!

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a strange land?

One minute she was standing in the door.

Passchendaele.

The Tunning of Elynour Rumming.

When Leonardo died in France, in 1519, it was in the arms of the king, Francis I, who had come to his bedside. Insists Vasari.

Ipse dixit.

February 2nd. Joyce’s birthday.

And Protagonist’s daughter’s.

October 25th. Picasso’s.

And Protagonist’s son’s.

The first edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra sold forty copies. Nietzsche had had to pay for publication.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Aristophanes.

Delacroix, on Ingres:

His art is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.

Demosthenes committed suicide with poison.

In the same year that Aristotle may have done so.

Grieg wrote his piano concerto at twenty-five.

And would produce nothing else of significance on a large scale in almost forty more years of composing.

Arnold Toynbee was an anti-Semite.

Orde Wingate.

I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent, Scott Fitzgerald said.

Capt. Wilfred Owen was an acting company commander, attempting to cross an enemy-held canal, when he was machine-gunned.

Wilhelm Furtwangler. Herbert von Karajan. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Alfred Cortot. Kirsten Flagstad. Walter Gieseking. Inextricably bedfellowed with the Nazis.

As was Gigli with the Italian fascists.

That nearby, Protagonist awakening mornings to the wash of the surf?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Thesmophoriazusae.

Anne Sexton sometimes allowed a recording of the Bachianas Brasileiras to replay itself endlessly when she was writing.

But now they that are younger than I have me

in derision,

Whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs

of my flock.

The Virgin for those who have nobody them with.

André Malraux flew sixty-five missions as the commander of the Loyalist air force. And in World War II was captured twice by the Germans while a leader of the Resistance, and twice escaped.

Was Moses murdered in the wilderness?

Was willst du_y fremder Mensch?

Bidú Sayão.

Freud and Frazer were immediate contemporaries. Freud read a good deal of Frazer. Frazer did not read one word of Freud.

Kurt Tucholsky committed suicide.

Henry Miller was an anti-Semite.

Les Nuits d’Été. The poems Gautier’s.

Whittier threw Leaves of Grass into a fire.

Suffering Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning once had to be prevented from eating a cigarette.

With kings and counsellors, murmured I.

Xanthus.

Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read?

What piece of music, the last he ever heard?

Matthew 27:3–5 says that Judas hanged himself.

I am old, and can no longer work, and am without means of livelihood, and my wife is ill.

Said Paolo Uccello on a tax declaration in Florence in 1469.

Un grand peut-être.

Sacajawea.

Fanny Imlay committed suicide with laudanum.

Rubens was fifty-three when he married his second wife Hélène. Who was sixteen.

No more behind

But such a day tomorrow as today

And to be boy eternal.

The second Brandenburg concerto, on an indestructible phonograph disc, is drifting eternally in space affixed to Voyager II

Anna Comnena.

Alfonsina Storni drowned herself in the Mar del Plata. Having mailed off her final manuscript that morning.

Ninety feet between bases is the greatest invention of Western man.

Jean Giraudoux was an anti-Semite.

Cavafy, acknowledged as the great Greek poet of his time. Who lived his entire writing life in Egypt.

The names of the dead.

Stanley Badner.

Carlo Crivelli was once imprisoned in Venice for kidnapping and rape.

And later knighted in Naples for creating altarpieces like the Madonna della Rondine.

Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide.

The shaving lotion that Malcolm Lowry drank in Manhattan in 1954 was Mennen Skin Bracer.

Protagonist will still have the same brand on a shelf at the cemetery.

O che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!

1 couldn’t do that to him.

Said Nora, at the suggestion that Joyce be given a Catholic funeral.

The several ancient oaks. Reader’s nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

And?

Saint Jude?

Gertrud Kolmar died at Auschwitz.

Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz.

Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.

And curst be he that moves my bones.

Remedios Varo was rumored to have committed suicide.

The ghost in the machine.

Alexander died in bed. Legend says that near the end he tried to drown himself in the Euphrates, hoping his body would be lost and his legions would believe he had been carried off as a god.

Roxane found him and shooed him back.

How does Protagonist spend a day like Thanksgiving?

Or any holiday?

How does Protagonist spend a simple Sunday?

Juvenal was an anti-Semite.

And can you not understand that having told you all this, I shall forever despise you for having heard it?

Someone wished Protagonist a merry Christmas in passing on the street yesterday?

Potestas Clavium.

Botticelli’s father was a tanner.

Maria Callas was rumored to have committed suicide.

Nelly Sachs was gotten out of Nazi Germany at the last possible moment. On a flight to Stockholm arranged by Selma Lagerlof.

With Reader well aware that he has still not satisfactorily thought Protagonist through.

Once, indisputably, more of an existence than his cartons and the recusant weeds amid the headstones of strangers.

How has Protagonist managed to so calamitously fuck up his life?

More than fifty thousand people followed Sartre’s cortege to Montparnasse Cemetery.

Where someone in the crowd fell into the grave on top of his coffin.

Truman Capote was an anti-Semite.

Or is he in some peculiar way perhaps thinking of an autobiography?

Did Jesus ever laugh?

Thirty-six publishers rejected The Ginger Man.

Houses. Automobiles. Summer homes.

Indulgences.

Jules Pascin committed suicide by slashing his wrists. And wrote, Lucy, forgiveness, to his mistress in blood on a wall.

Flaubert and Baudelaire were prosecuted for immorality in the same year.

Y la vida no es noble, ni buena, ni sagrada.

The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

He was a moment in the conscience of mankind.

A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.

Kant’s habits were so precise that shopkeepers in Konigsberg adjusted their clocks by his daily three-thirty walk.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes committed suicide.

A Christ of our neighborhood, Ortega called Don Quixote.

Can Reader force any of it all?

Or will memory still persist in sidetracking imagination?

A Wehrmacht officer in Picasso’s studio during the occupation of Paris, re a photograph of Guernica: Did you do this?

To which Picasso: No, you did.

I grow older ever learning many things.

Said Solon.

Abraham Cowley died after sleeping off a drunk in a damp pasture.

As above, so below.

Remembering a Fern, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games.

Remembering a Kate, strikingly handsome, who plucked a knotted root from a river in Spain.

Renoir was an anti-Semite.

Michelangelo died in Rome. And had to be smuggled out, quite literally wrapped like merchandise, to be buried at Florence rather than in St. Peter’s.

Vasari’s reportage in this instance authoritative.

Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.

Ross Lockridge committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.

Books are a load of crap, a Larkin line says.

Ernest Dowson was dead, penniless, at thirty-two. Of absinthe and influenza.

Nero kicked Poppaea in the stomach when she was pregnant. And killed her. The Monteverdi Poppaea opera concluding rather earlier in her biography than this.

Remembering a lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced.

Remembering a Josie. And a Liz. And a Susan.

Marina Tsvetayeva hanged herself. And was buried no one knows where.

C. S. Lewis, on overly romanticizing the distant past: Think of a world without anesthetics.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

Will Protagonist have ever found flowers?

The woman, bearing any?

Four of Freud’s five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.

Four.

Aeschylus was a foot soldier at Marathon. And wanted that, rather than his plays, noted in his epitaph.

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

And only the day before yesterday, once having seemed.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa.

Remembering Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci.

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down, yea, we wept.

Was Peter Warlock the only serious composer who ever committed suicide?

Tchaikovsky and Schumann and Hugo Wolf having tried, but unsuccessfully.

Berlioz also, though being histrionic only.

Who is the woman at the grave?

Erinna ofTelos.

Chaucer was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey. Simply having lived in Westminster.

I have come to this place because.

Are Saint Francis of Assisi’s stigmata the earliest ever recorded?

Shakespeare’s mother and father were illiterate. And only one of his two daughters, Susanna, could sign her name. The other, Judith, made a mark.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His one son, Hamnet, Judith’s twin, died at eleven.

Before certain dawns at the gatehouse, like a windborne echo out of Protagonist’s own childhood, the wailing of a far-off train?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Remembering yet others?

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

Some even now dead?

Nonetheless.

Did it ever, once, enter even Protagonist’s bleakest conjecturings that he would finish out his life alone?

Katherine Hamlet.

Of making many books there is no end.

I have not read a novel in any language in very many years, Joyce once mentioned.

Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.

And then walked home and took two days to die.

No survivor could recall having ever seen a single bird flying near any of the Nazi death camps.

Arbeit macht frei.

Mozart, the Ave, verum corpus.

A street in Paris, the late 1890s:

Madame Melba, you don’t know who I am? I’m Oscar Wilde, and I’m going to do a terrible thing. I’m going to ask you for money.

Dostoievsky was an anti-Semite.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

Emma Bovary.

Anna Karenina.

Othello.

Jocasta.

Brünnhilde.

Hedda Gabler.

Romeo and Juliet.

Werther.

Dido.

Cio-Cio-San.

Antigone and Haemon.

Miss Julie.

Axel Heyst.

Quentin Compson.

Aïda.

Inspector Javert.

Mynheer Peeperkorn. Leo Naphta.

Smerdyakov.

Rudolf Virag.

Edna Pontellier.

Hero.

Manrico’s Leonora.

Cheri.

Goneril.

Richard Cory.

McWatt.

Tosca.

Stavrogin. Kirillov.

Martin Eden.

Hurstwood.

Pyramus and Thisbe.

Roithamer.

Pierre Glendinning.

Winnie Verloc.

George Wilson.

Hedvig Ekdal.

Christine Mannon. Orin Mannon.

Willy Loman.

Senta.

Peter Kien.

Maggie Johnson.

Peter Grimes.

Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter.

Svidrigailov.

James O. Incandenza.

Konstantin Treplev.

Bartleby.

Septimus Smith.

Deirdre.

Seymour Glass.

Ophelia.

Samson.

Eustacia Vye.

Phaedra.

Alcestis.

Launcelot.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His last surviving grandchild, Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth, would live until 1670.

But leaving no further descendants.

A daughter of Dante’s, called Antonia, went into a nunnery at his death.

And adopted the name Sister Beatrice.

Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.

Jesus? he murmured, Jesus — of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.

Protagonist’s children?

With Reader well aware that he has categorically not thought that through either.

As with how much monumentally else?

Nine hundred and sixty Jews committed suicide at Masada, in 73 A.D., rather than surrender to the Roman legions that had lately sacked Jerusalem.

Two small rough orange stones.

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Virgil died at fifty. Shakespeare was fifty-two. Dante, fifty-six.

Petrarch, seventy, died at his desk. Having been reading.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

At modest estimate, at least 40 percent of the entire population of Europe was annihilated during the four years of the Black Death.

His inevitable portage of cartons? Beside a stairway to no passage?

In accommodations at a derelict graveyard? Where nobody comes, where nobody calls?

Now are fields of corn where Troy once was.

Dead?

She?

I would give you some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.

Vanishing point.

Toward what final grievous contemplation amid the disarray?

The sun will run out of hydrogen and commence to die in approximately one billion, one hundred million years.

In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the beach but to saunter out among the sandpipers and the gulls one afternoon, and stand for a time abstractedly in late autumn solitude, and then walk unremarkably into the sea?

In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the cemetery but to pause at his accustomed window one afternoon, and gaze for a time abstractedly at the ranks of still white stone beyond, and then turn unremarkably to the gas?

And Reader? And Reader?

In the end one experiences only one’s self.

Said Nietzsche.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.