One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law; why try to contradict it?

John Jay Chapman’s conclusion that a visiting Martian would come away with a more critical lesson about life on earth from attending an Italian opera than from reading Emerson.

September 13, 1506, Andrea Mantegna died on.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Lente currite noctis equi.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Of no significance whatsoever. But the hospital where Dylan Thomas would die, sixty-one years after the fact, was the one after which Edna Millay had been named.

O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

Pandora’s box. Which in the first written version of the tale, in Hesiod, is in fact a jar.

A reference to the good old hearty female stench, unquote.

Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.

Flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude, Isaac Deutscher called Doctor Zhivago.

Like Benedetto Croce earlier, Ignazio Silone lost both of his parents in an earthquake.

Paul Robeson’s Othello.

Renée Fleming’s Metropolitan opening-night Desdemona — sung only three weeks after having given birth to a second child.

Because of a promise to his mother, Jorge Luis Borges recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of his life:

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook.

And prayers have no power the Plague to stay.

Wrote Long Will.

Montaigne was taught to read and speak Latin before he knew French.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was reading Plato and Aristophanes, in Latin translations, at the age of eight.

Anton Bruckner, in old age, tells Gustav Mahler that he can readily foresee his coming interrogation by his Maker — Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than that you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little.

Cosima Wagner’s Jewish great-grandmother.

Egon Schiele was once briefly jailed — but then not prosecuted — on allegations of abducting and molesting a girl of thirteen.

Q. Who is the Buddha?

After a performance, Queen Victoria once ventured to inform Paderewski that he was a genius.

The word nihilism.

The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground and into his mouth as he sang.

Nelson, at Trafalgar. Who had a horseshoe nailed to the mainmast of the Victory before the battle.

Niels Bohr — who kept one above a door in his vacation home.

I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains.

Franco Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew. In which Zeffirelli’s name in the credits was larger than Shakespeare’s.

Please return this book. I find that though many of my friends are poor mathematicians, they are nearly all good bookkeepers.

January 14, 2005, Victoria de los Angeles died on.

Ivor Gurney, who was both wounded and gassed at Passchendaele, spent the last fifteen of his remaining twenty years in a mental institution — convinced that the war was still going on.

Italo Calvino died after a cerebral hemorrhage suffered while sitting in a garden.

A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.

From a letter of Petrarch’s, ca. 1352, in which he mentions having been reminded of some task or other by the town clock:

Eliot’s second marriage, in 1957, took place in the same Kensington church where Jules Laforgue had been married seventy-one years earlier — which Eliot claimed not to have known beforehand.

How can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?

G. E. Moore was known to appear at his Cambridge classroom in bedroom slippers.

Father, dear father, come home with me now!

I don’t go upstairs two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

Actually, the door to Novelist’s roof is connected to an alarm. Workmen unable to locate the building superintendent now and again trip it. No one pays any attention, however.

Jean Giraudoux spent two very brief periods, when young, as an instructor at Harvard.

The writer Bret Easton Ellis, who imparted to a New York Times reporter that he had been reading the Bible — but then seemed uncertain as to whether in the Old Testament or the New.

The frequent blind beggars in Euripides, particularly in plays now lost.

August Strindberg’s mother had been a barmaid.

The marriage of Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill — which lasted three months.

The Greatest Novel Reader in the World.

Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. At twenty-seven.

Sir Thomas Bodley, who organized the Oxford library subsequently named the Bodleian, permitted the inclusion of no such idle bookes and riffe raffes — unquote — as writings for the current theater.

Allen Ginsberg’s insistence that he was once accosted by the apparitional voice of William Blake — immediately after masturbating.

How now! Whose mare’s dead?

The extraordinary fame of Menander in antiquity — to the point where he is even quoted by Saint Paul.

Robert Graves’ claim that as an infant at Wimbledon he had been occasionally patted on the head by Swinburne — he himself being wheeled by his nurse, Swinburne en route to his pub.

Theodore Watts-Dunton’s wife’s claim that when the monumentally alcoholic Swinburne was finally weaned away from brandy, he initially drank port because Tennyson did, then burgundy because of the Musketeers in Dumas, and at last ale — because of Shakespeare.

If there is anyone here I have forgotten to insult, I apologize.

Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.

No battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.

Ovid’s banishment from Rome by Augustus — which meant that his books were automatically removed from the city’s libraries as well.

The similar banning of Virgil’s and Livy’s three decades later — by Caligula, who simply did not like them.

May the devil bung a cesspool with his skull.

One of us was once in love for eight days with a woman of fairly easy virtue, and the other for three days with a ten-franc whore. Altogether, eleven days of love between the two of us.

Longfellow published his first poem at thirteen.

Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at seventeen — and after publication several years later was to hear it called a hoax.

Never having realized that there originally once was an actual troublemaking Irish family named Hooligan.

Or a military officer named Shrapnel.

The John Cage composition entitled 4'33"

Cervantes was fifty-eight when Part I of Don Quixote was published.

Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.

I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.

Said Kurt Vonnegut.

Has Novelist ever known many who could not contrive some way to keep the pot boiling during fallow stretches?

General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov.

Joseph Ignace Guillotin.

Sir Rudolf Bing was once robbed of a cheap watch he wore only for sentimental reasons. Zinka Milanov was infuriated:

The mugging in which Giuseppe di Stefano, at eighty-three, was quite badly injured — while being stripped of a gold chain he had been given by Maria Callas.

It was Beckett’s wife who took the call informing them that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. Her first reaction, even as she turned to tell him:

Toledo, Judah Halevi was born in.

Saint Benedict, essentially the founder of moderate monastic rule.

In the dense mist

Beethoven’s brief period as a pupil of Hadyn’s:

There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.

Inconceivable nonsense.

Machiavelli’s interminable visits to prostitutes — described in unexpurgated detail in his correspondence.

Graham Greene’s — so compulsive that a biographer was able to reproduce a cryptic list, in Greene’s handwriting, of a favorite forty-seven.

Georges Simenon’s — whose autobiography speaks of as many as a thousand.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Yeats evidently knew no music.

The word serendipity.

August 22, 1904, Kate Chopin died on.

August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

George Eliot’s instantaneous anger over any sort of anti-Semitic reference or joke.

Molière was on stage, performing in the role of the hypochondriac in his own last play Le Malade imaginaire, when he was stricken by the bursting blood vessel that caused his death a day later.

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.

When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow — is it always the book?

Owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.

Ménière’s disease, Swift suffered from.

Erysipelas, Herman Melville.

Chopin’s phthisis — which left him weighing less than one hundred pounds.

They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof.

The central railway-station platform of destinies.

Virginia Woolf ’s suicide, for which she filled her pockets with stones before walking into the Ouse.

Sleet falling;

Verlaine was at most eight or nine feet away when he famously fired three shots at Rimbaud with a revolver — fortunately no more than wounding him in the wrist with the first and missing completely with the next two.

The painter of painters.

A German equivalent of Tubby, Schubert’s nickname was, among his friends.

Not to be born is far best.

Not to be born at all would be the best thing.

Richard Feynman’s conviction that as the perspective grows more and more distant, James Clerk Maxwell will loom ever larger as the single towering eminence of the nineteenth century.

The one truly great political figure of our age.

Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.

A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.

Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.

March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.

Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.

I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!

Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.

John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.

Freud’s addiction to cocaine.

Sherlock Holmes’.

Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.

The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.

The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets — which mentions none either.

Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.

The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.

Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.

By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.

Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.

Butterfly, my child.

William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.

Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.

Henry Roth acknowledged the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.

Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.

Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.

Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.

Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.

Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.

Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.

Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.

Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Said Voltaire — describing opera.

Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.

Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.

Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.

Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.

An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.

Pelion and Ossa. In Odyssey XI. In Georgics I. In Horace’s Odes III.

The thirteen extant letters of Plato.

Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.

I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.

One author pilfers the best of another.

Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.

Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.

February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.

Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.

A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in As You Like It, taken in 1882.

Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad: Mon cher confrère.

More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.

Spinach, fruit, water.

Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.

A sort of gutless Kipling.

Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.

Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.

Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment annihilated at Gallipoli.

No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.

I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.

He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College.

Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.

The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.

At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.

Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.

The Book of Margery Kempe, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.

Martin Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt — conducted in the main at a squalid hotel next to the Marburg railroad station.

Sainte-Beuve’s affair with Victor Hugo’s wife.

Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.

November 30, 1935, Fernando Pessoa died on.

Leuprolide acetate. Metoprolol. Hydrochlorothiazide. Atorva-statin. Aspirin. Salmeterol xinafoate. Flunisolide. Omeprazole.

Loperamide hydrochloride. Simethicone. Calcium carbonate.

Or is Novelist forgetting one or two.

It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation.

Jeanne Eagels. As the original Sadie Thompson.

Irene Papas, as Antigone.

Lucretius calls Iphigenia.

You never hear of a novel-wright or a picture-wright or a poem-wright — why a playwright?

When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.

Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.

How many of you are there in the quartet?

The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.

Alprazolam.

Robert Pershing Doerr.

Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight characters in Hamlet — eight — die violently.

The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.

174517 —

Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.

Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.

Trying to conceive of having attended Georgia State College for Women in the mid-1940s.

Paul Valéry’s wife was a niece of Berthe Morisot — and had in fact posed for Morisot any number of times.

Alexander Blok’s wife was the daughter of the chemist Mendeleyev.

Morningless sleep.

Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds.

Being but a handful among artists who never married.

An unpurchasable mind.

Baudelaire, twice — in print — called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.

Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka:

In addition to French, Delacroix read fluently in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and evidently German.

Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.

Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.

Pigalle’s sculpture of a naked eighty-plus-year-old Voltaire — for which the body was posed for by a different elderly man altogether.

Saul Kripke had mastered advanced calculus before finishing grammar school.

She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife.

Readers who assume that the title Samson Agonistes means something about Samson in pain.

After the breakthrough by Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs, the next two dominant black singers at the Metropolitan were Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo. Arroyo was frequently mistaken for Price. I’m the other one, love, she told the Met doorkeeper who got it wrong one morning.

Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

Fanny Burney’s account of her surgery for breast cancer at fifty-nine, in 1811.

Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.

A hetaera named Cyrene, remembered for 2,400 years — because Aristophanes indicates that she could perform in a dozen different positions.

Theoris and Archippe, two others remembered for slightly longer.

Apelles’ long-lost Birth of Venus, painted 1,800 years before Botticelli’s — and said to have been a likeness of Phryne, the most beautiful of them all.

And all of whom must surely have been included in an equally irretrievable work by Suetonius —

Shakespeare’s younger sister.

Cervantes was a relative of his.

I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life, the freedom to live as one pleased.

Nulla dies sine linea.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was wounded three times in the Civil War.

John Simon’s verdict that there were two things he was able to say about the poems of Robert Creeley:

It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.

March 13, 1979, Madeleine Grey died on.

Contemporary art criticism, second decade, fourteenth century. From the Purgatorio:

Our sodomite-saint.

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

A London street called Ropemaker’s Lane, Daniel Defoe died in.

Gibbon, on Samuel Johnson:

Boswell, on Gibbon:

It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Bertrand Russell was born ten years before James Joyce, and died on Joyce’s birthday — twenty-nine years after him.

Jane Avril died in an old people’s home. Forty-one years after the death of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead — but whose own coffin was adorned with a silvered cross.

Damn, I’m almost sorry you called. Can you even begin to guess how many friends of mine that makes, just in the past year or so?

The failure of the 1853 premiere of Verdi’s La Traviatta — essentially because the soprano was viewed as too plump for a heroine dying of tuberculosis.

I think A Bend in the River is much, much better than Conrad.

The acute suggestiveness in Pascal’s apology for having written a particularly long letter.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature.

Says Henry in The Dream Songs.

The Homer of painting, Reynolds called Michelangelo.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.

An eclectic realist of disputed merit.

Miles Davis’s speedometer had already reached 105 miles per hour, on New York’s West Side Highway, when one of the people with him asked if he should be driving so fast.

Corbière was dead at thirty.

Giorgione, at thirty-three or thirty-four.

Books weaken the memory.

Machines cannot think.

Charles Ives gave away the cash that came with his Pulitzer Prize.

Created only for imbeciles, rogues, and rascals, Cézanne had had it.

Conversely Edvard Grieg, who displayed his medals unabashedly — particularly since they sped him through customs with all complications waived, he discovered.

The meaningless oddity that one of Washington’s pet hounds at Mount Vernon — was named Truman.

The report that Turner, told he was dying, asked his doctor to leave the room for a glass of sherry and then to judge things again.

Amiri Baraka’s slapdash, banal, repetitious, self-contradictory, mendacious poem, Somebody Blew Up America.

He who writes for fools will always find a large audience.

Tertian malaria, Velazquez died of.

The words honest — or honesty — occur fifty-two times in Othello.

Diodorus Siculus. Twelve volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Dio Cassius. Nine volumes.

Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.

There’s rosemary for you and rue for you.

Ted Williams.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Les bourgeois, ce sont les autres.

Baudelaire wore rouge.

Because of global warming, the last snows will be gone from Kilimanjaro very possibly within Novelist’s own remaining lifetime.

January 5, 1942, Tina Modotti died on.

Cardinal Newman, being directed by Everett Millais to a tall chair atop a platform where he was to sit for his portrait:

Abject bottom-licking narcissism —

Bogus, Zelda Fitzgerald’s word for him was.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s addiction to chloral hydrate. And whiskey.

There will always be another poet.

You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair.

Until the election of Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1981, no woman had ever been named to the French Academy.

On the original title pages of Jane Austen, before the posthumous disclosure of her identity:

Ray Bradbury’s father was a telephone lineman.

His third wife, Lady Jean Campbell, in regard to life with Norman Mailer:

No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Constable. Etty. Haydon. Landseer. Leslie.

Pavel Tchelitchew. Wyndham Lewis. Roger Fry.

Jean Harlow was dead at twenty-six.

Old enough so that gradual loss of bone has left him at least two and a half inches shorter than he was when younger.

Say Samuel Butler’s Notebooks.

This is the foul fiend, Fibbertigibbet.

The first Crusade fought its way into Jerusalem in July of 1099. Some seventy thousand surviving Muslims — the majority being women and children — were methodically slaughtered. Such Jews as remained were burned alive in a synagogue.

George Sand did virtually all of her writing between midnight and six AM — and then slept until three in the afternoon.

Four years before Haydn’s death in Vienna, somehow a rumor announcing same reached Paris — where Cherubini and Kreutzer composed music for a memorial.

Andrew Jackson was twelve years old when he enlisted to fight in the Revolutionary War.

I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.

Andreas Baader. Gudrun Ensslin. Ulrike Meinhof.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Brooklyn Dodgers fans.

Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the United States — which brought him to St. Joseph, Missouri, only one week after the shooting of Jesse James.

That dirty little coward

Who shot Mister Howard

And laid poor Jesse in his grave.

Irving Berlin had no schooling after the fifth grade.

Thomas Edison had only three months of actual classroom time.

Agatha Christie had none whatsoever.

One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.

Frida Kahlo’s amputated leg.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s.

The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell night; welcome day! His daughter went through the river singing, but no one could understand what she said.

Dr. Donne’s verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

Among those mailing an order to Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, for an earliest copy of Ulysses — Winston Churchill.

July 17, 1974, Dizzy Dean died on.

Emerald eyes, Dante says Beatrice had.

A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.

A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.

Jane Welsh Carlyle died a virgin.

The avant-garde. A kind of research and development arm of the culture industry, the critic Thomas Crowe called it.

It is utterly impossible to persuade an editor that he is nobody.

Galen’s astonishingly voluminous medical knowledge — much of it acquired while working as the surgeon at a gladiatorial school.

Pontormo’s diary. Which generally concentrates more on the state of his bowels than on anything of interest in art history.

Among the worst books ever committed to paper.

A child’s introduction to Nietzsche and Jung.

The year lost to tuberculosis early in her career by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — probably contracted in dank World War II Vienna air-raid shelters.

Mallarmé, never well-off, who nonetheless possessed works by Whistler, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Rodin — all personal gifts.

Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.

Karl Marx died sitting at his desk.

Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.

People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.

Oranges and lemons,

Say the bells of St. Clement’s.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin only because a bacteria culture with which he was experimenting became contaminated — by accident.

Chesterfield’s definition of the word illiterate, as a noun, 1748:

Matthew Arnold’s of philistine, ca. 1869:

Barbarous, Samuel Pepys called Hamlet.

Jessica Lange was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

And yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.

Mark Twain’s pronouncement that the personages in a novel should be alive, except in the instance of corpses — and that the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the others.

When I was boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.

Said Sitting Bull.

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches.

Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

Noting that the first word of English that Robinson Crusoe teaches his man Friday — after the name Friday itself — is Master.

Nathanael West once applied for a Guggenheim fellowship with recommendations from Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley.

Novelist’s own Guggenheim applications, plural, with references equally as impressive.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better, than in actual life.

Marco Polo died three years after Dante.

Horace Greeley died insane.

Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.

D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow.

The 1940s network radio broadcast of La Bohème in which Toscanini could be distinctly heard humming along with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce as he conducted.

Karl Popper claimed he had written the 480-plus pages of The Open Society and Its Enemies more than thirty times.

We did not ask you white men to come here.

A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, said Martin Luther King.

Georges Rouault was born during a bombardment in the Franco-Prussian War — in a Paris cellar.

Bob Dylan, as poet:

Bob Dylan, as composer:

April 21, 1924, Eleonora Duse died on.

For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.

Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince while living on Long Island.

Well past fifty, Tolstoy began an intensive study of Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi — not very many years after having devoted similar concentration to mastering Greek.

The awareness of not having accomplished anything, and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future, is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us.

When will you pay me?

You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.

Act. Then call upon the gods.

That tampon painter.

The friendship of Zola and Cézanne.

The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.

Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies.

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

For a time, at the Tuileries, Napoleon kept the Mona Lisa in his bedroom.

Only this tardily realizing — that if he had not made use of his middle name, among the better-known twentieth-century American poets would be a William Williams.

One of the two listed witnesses at the wedding of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the church janitor.

Turgenev was sentenced to a month in jail, and subsequent banishment from St. Petersburg, for the simple act of having written an obituary of Gogol, whose work was considered subversive by czarist authorities.

I absolutely cannot do without it.

Veronese’s Finding of Moses, at the Prado.

The last time anyone mentioned Erskine Caldwell.

Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano.

Met him pike hoses.

Had Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted any Stockhausen?

Before the Euro, the portrait of Yeats on Ireland’s twenty-pound note.

The Melville ten?

One of the rare pieces of expository writing by a woman in antiquity — a list of rules for behavior when visiting an exclusive house of prostitution.

Left by one Gnathaena, in third-century Athens, and actually catalogued in the great library of Alexandria until its destruction.

No more than ten or twelve weeks after an actress he had been living with took her own life, Gottfried Benn was engaged to another woman.

1427–1429. Being the closest one can evidently come to a date for the death of Masaccio.

The Threepenny Opera. For which Brecht stole much of the language from someone else’s German translation of the original John Gay version — and for which he was ultimately forced to surrender part of his royalties.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.

God help us, did I not tell your Grace that those were nothing but windmills?

All cats are grey in the dark.

What would non-creative writing be?

Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.

Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.

Brightnesse falls from the ayre.

He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.

Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.

E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.

Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.

Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.

Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.

The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.

Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.

A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.

After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:

Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.

Now I’ll have eine kleine pause.

British cavalry in the Crimean War were so scandalously ill-supplied and neglected that many starved to death — as did the very horses that had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.

February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed on.

Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

A dreadful old fraud.

A sententious, holding-forth old bore who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word.

Edith Piaf was four feet eight inches tall.

George Lyman Kittredge, who taught Shakespeare at Harvard for forty-eight years — and demanded that all of his students memorize at least six hundred lines per semester.

Six hundred lines. The student reciting the entire To be or not to be soliloquy has mastered all of thirty-five.

Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones.

Ephesus, Mary Magdalen died in.

José Clemente Orozco lost his left hand in a college chemistry explosion.

Mr. McChoakumchild, Dickens names the demanding schoolmaster in Hard Times.

An abridged, accelerated, night-school course.

Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?

For a millennium, or longer, Greek and then Roman seamen along the coast of the Troad repeatedly insisted they had seen the ghosts of Achilles and/or Hector in full armor at the shore.

After Vicente Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize, Madrid renamed the street on which he lived in his honor.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.

A remedy once suggested by Camille Pissarro for the betterment of French art:

What I have always liked about this place are the windows.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths — Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines — and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.

A trampish sort of appearance.

Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, dull, self-centered.

Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.

December 31, 1936, Unamuno died on.

October 18, 1955, Ortega.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, well into his political career, at least once wrote a book review.

Bach was fifteen when he began his professional music career.

A quart or more of alcohol per day, uncounted amphetamines, uncounted aspirin, uncounted barbiturates — and at a minimum two packs of cigarettes.

The novels of Paul de Kock, which are admired by Molly Bloom.

Dear President George W. Bush:

John Kenneth Galbraith was made to repeat his senior year in high school.

Scarcely intelligible, Dryden labeled Shakespeare’s language.

A jockey can earn more in one race than a schoolteacher is paid in an entire year.

He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward.

Landlords in lower Manhattan who were shrewd enough, over the years, to accept recent work by moneyless young artists instead of rent.

Jaroslav Seifert, like Dostoievsky earlier, who once eluded execution only moments before the shots were to be fired.

The nephew of Aeschylus named Philocles, also a playwright, all of whose plays are lost.

A cask of brandy, Nelson’s corpse was brought back to London in, after Trafalgar.

Agonies of galloping speechlessness.

When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone.

Late-life Nietzsche postcards — that he signed Kaiser Nietzsche.

Freakish, Voltaire called the Divine Comedy.

Extravagant, absurd, disgusting.

According to Ford Madox Ford, Flaubert once opened his front door to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev in his dressing gown — and thus offended James’s sensibilities virtually beyond redemption.

The nicest old lady I ever met.

Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections.

A post-Mao version of the Long March — which implies that forcibly conscripted porters carried him on a litter for much of the 5,000 miles.

All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution.

Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians — all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.

David Gascoyne’s addiction to Benzedrene. And lighter-fluid fumes.

Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

Remembering that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Fundamentalismbecility.

Django Reinhardt died of a cerebral hemorrhage — while fishing in the Seine.

People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.

Our father who art in heaven

Stay there.

Requested Jacques Prévert.

Tamara Geva. Vera Zorina. Maria Tallchief. Tanaquil Le Clercq.

Offensive, ill-written, mechanical. All in all, detestable.

I count only on being reprinted in 1900.

I shall hear in heaven.

Do Not Leave Car Unattendant.

Jean Giono was twice imprisoned for collaboration with the Nazis in World War II.

Englishing Pindar is so exacting, concluded Abraham Cowley, that if one were to attempt it literally it would sound as if one certifiable lunatic had translated another.

Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were for a time roommates.

The first use of the word classic in its long since traditional sense — by the Latin critic Aulus Gellius, ca. 180 AD.

I am no Einstein.

Pope Eliot.

Michelangelo’s David stood on the open porch of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Michelangelo had asked that it be placed, from 1504 until 1873 — when Florence moved it into the Academy and out of the weather.

And to where some cretin a hundred and twenty years later would take a hammer to its left foot.

Only a single, incomplete manuscript of the Annals of Tacitus remained extant after the Dark Ages.

August 21, 2005, Dahlia Ravikovitch died on.

Pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world —

The ménage à trois involving Paul and Gala Eluard and Max Ernst — After which Gala became Gala Dalí.

Simone de Beauvoir’s affair with Nelson Algren.

A leper and a sodomite.

Like a vile scum on a pond.

Landskip, painters long spoke of it as.

Dreiser, years in advance, telling H. L. Mencken that he has already prepared his dying words:

Alan Turing was dead at forty-one.

You don’t have a computer? So how do you write your books?

Wondering if anyone, ever, has listened to Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march without repeated irrepressible grins of delight?

I fear that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.

He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table.

The likelihood that Lenin died of syphilis.

Raymond Chandler did not publish his first novel until he was fifty.

Dashiell Hammett published his fifth novel at thirty-nine — and not one thing else in the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.

Great Empedocles, that ardent soul,

Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole.

Oh, that flagon, that wicked flagon! thought Rip — what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?

Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf.

The speculation that Horace’s father, himself a manumitted slave, might also have been a Jew.

December 11, 1513, Pintoricchio died on.

So excessively did Shaw admire Strindberg that he actually used the money from his Nobel Prize to arrange for better English translations of Strindberg’s plays.

John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:

Thomas Nashe was dead at thirty-one. Where, of what, or even exactly when, remains unknown.

Zapata was thirty-nine when he was murdered.

Stephen Dedalus, at Sandymount, in 1904.

Trollope’s declaration that he wrote with his watch on the desk in front of him — so that he could be certain he had produced at least two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.

Picasso’s admiration for Charlie Chaplin.

Stalin’s.

As early as in Plutarch:

Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

The novels of Susan Sontag:

From a letter of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once leaving his study:

No further martinis after dinner, Conrad Aiken’s physician once commanded.

If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison.

I shall fight as long as I live. And I shall not consider it more important to be alive than to be free.

The eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. Whose pulpit voice was so effective, said David Garrick, that he could make listeners laugh or cry by no more than pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.

Gertrude Stein’s Model T style, Elizabeth Hardwick called it.

There is one rule that can render your hand so light that the brush will float, says Cennino Cennini’s handbook for painters, ca. 1435:

Every drop of sperm spilled is a masterpiece lost.

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw.

Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. In which Joseph has removed the saddle of an ass to use as a seat — while the ass itself brays in the background.

Erik Satie lived the entire later half of his life in extreme indigence.

Incredulity that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony — the Unfinished — was not once performed until thirty-seven years after his death.

Toasted Susie is my ice cream.

Pythagoras’s insistence that in one of his earlier incarnations he had fought in the Trojan War.

Borges’ vision of Paradise:

The long-hoped-for opportunity to meet Byron that Schopenhauer turned away from at the last moment — when the woman he was with evinced far too much enthusiasm of her own about it.

Epi oinopa ponton.

Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.

In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew — by the age of sixteen.

October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.

Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.

Wondering how many lifetime scribes and/or manuscript copyists were put out of work in the decades immediately after Gutenberg?

Sofa-size.

Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four.

You have reached Ned Klein. Please leave a message after the beep.

When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.

Windy humbuggeries.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe.

The 2005 Vienna exhibition featuring erotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele — at which patrons arriving nude or in skimpy bathing suits were admitted free.

Colossal ennui. It seems to me that I could write something like it tomorrow by taking inspiration from the cat walking over the keyboard on my piano.

It is impossible to finish any of his plays, they are pitiful.

A lot of twaddle.

More than sixty percent of the people in the United States do not know what the capitalized word Holocaust in its common contemporary usage stands for.

Assuming that Saul Bellow was aware of the Moses Herzog mentioned in passing in Ulysses?

A desperate Stevie Smith addict.

April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died on.

Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Clov: What is there to keep me here?

The Girl of the Golden West, Act III — in which the soprano arrives on stage on horseback.

One of the earliest translations of the Bible in America — into Mohawk.

At one juncture during his years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville was forced to take a cut in salary — from $4.00 to $3.60 per day.

Oscar Hammerstein’s first job in America, in a cigar factory, paid him two dollars a week.

Andrew Carnegie’s, in a cotton mill, had paid $1.50 — for twelve-hour days.

Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper died in.

Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Novelist also happens to be typing this last book only short blocks away from.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, ca. 1485.

To cause justice to prevail in the land.

Anthony Burgess’s bad eyesight.

Lloyd George knew my father,

Father knew Lloyd George.

In 1907, Caruso was being paid $2,000 per performance at the Metropolitan.

The uncanny sense of atmosphere in certain Constable landscapes.

Remembering next to nothing about The Courtship of Miles Standish — except that Longfellow himself was in fact descended from Priscilla and John Alden.

Mozart wrote his Thirty-Sixth Symphony, the Linz, in at most three days.

In the period when artists of stature were called upon to paint likenesses of hunted murderers on the walls of Florentine buildings, Andrea del Castagno’s led to so many captures that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati — Andrea of the Hanged.

Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.

January 11, 1966, Giacometti died on.

The Marquis de Sade was at least once arrested for sodomy.

Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.

Ivy Compton-Burnett died after a bronchitis attack.

Martin Luther King’s seminary studies — during which he received a grade of C in public speaking.

A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

Said Rebecca West.

He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.

Very dirty and completely worthless.

Wholly ignorant.

Wonderful, this death.

Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.

Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four.

An incomparable painting by Apelles, which Augustus brought from Cos to Rome, where it was slightly damaged.

Auden’s notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.

I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company.

Euripides’ father may have been a tavern-keeper.

Though for that matter he gave three others the names of buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.

A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself as being well on the road to old age — having long since passed forty.

Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of forty-two.

Anacreon, so highly acclaimed as a poet that the Athenians placed a statue of him on the Acropolis.

November 30, 1943, Etty Hillesum died on.

I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much.

Wrote Poe to a friend.

Reading a book in translation:

Traduttore, traditore — translator, traitor, the Italian has it.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, his full name was.

A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail.

Inscribed on a painting by Jacob Jordaens:

According to Liszt, Chopin had blue eyes.

The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.

Catherine the Great died after having suffered a stroke and fallen from a commode in the royal water closet.

Eric Andrews here. Well, actually not here. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the signal.

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s father was a construction worker on the Suez Canal.

The Homeric combat between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal at a 1977 cocktail party — In which Mailer threw a drink into Vidal’s face — and Vidal bit Mailer on the finger.

Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, near Bristol, J. K.

Rilke’s over-sentimentalizing of the poor.

Why did Harper Lee never write another novel?

First, check the acoustics. Then make sure you know where the fire axe is.

Intellectual — hen-pecked you all.

So exhaustive was Raphael’s study of ancient sculpture in Rome that the city itself named him Keeper of Inscriptions and Remains.

Prokofiev was fifteen years older than Shostakovich.

The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othello by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West — near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Warren Spahn died in.

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

The last time anyone mentioned James Jones.

March 22, 1417, Nicolas Flamel died on.

In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.

Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar — which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.

Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate — for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.

I am half sick of shadows, said

The Lady of Shalott.

Tirra lirra, by the river

Sang Sir Lancelot.

Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?

Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of I Promessi Sposi — and twelve more on the final version.

Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.

Readily read?

A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat — with his left hand.

The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!

I just pretend.

A pale, gentle, frightened little man.

Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.

The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.

Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.

Chardin died at eighty — without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault.

Johnson told Boswell.

Chingachgook —

Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed — and slept on newspapers.

Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it — that’s all right.

The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.

Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.

August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.

Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps — schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of The Prince and the Pauper and Around the World in Eighty Days.

God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.

Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.

Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.

Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.

The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.

As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.

Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?

Poetry makes nothing happen.

I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.

Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.

I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.

Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.

Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.

More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.

Me retracto de todo lo dicho, I take back everything I told you.

Everything useful is ugly.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his Blue Boy to mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.

Nicanor Parra’s day job —

Miroslav Holub’s —

Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.

Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.

So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.

Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.

And to this day is every scholar poor:

Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.

October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.

As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.

Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.

Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.

M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.

Why, this is very midsummer madness.

We live not as we will — but as we can.

Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —

Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in Odyssey VIII.

Languidezza per il caldo — Languidly, because of the heat.

For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.

In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.

Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.

The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on — and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.

Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.

Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time — Finnegans Wake.

America’s Emily Dickinson dime?

Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.

Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer — the three centuries in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.

January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.

Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.

Gogol’s.

Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.

Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:

A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.

Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute was first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.

Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.

Sit in thy cell — and thy cell shall teach thee all things.

Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath — or even washing his face.

Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians — who expended endless ingenuity in forever attempting to make each other break up into onstage laughter.

Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.

Wine, the title of John Gay’s first published poem was.

One’s first glass of the day is a great event.

Acknowledged Thackeray.

Not drunk is he who from the floor

Can rise alone and still drink more.

Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.

Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.

A manual-winding pocket watch, Einstein carried.

Snivel in a wet hanky, D. H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.

At fifty-eight, two years before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of fourteen pounds.

Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals.

Little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on earth.

Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

Well over a century after Dostoievsky’s death in St. Petersburg, a great-grandson named Dmitri Dostoievsky still lived there — working as a tram driver.

Twenty-some years after Missolonghi, Teresa Guiccioli married a Parisian marquis — who was known to habitually introduce her as Ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.

August Comte married a prostitute.

Ibsen’s terror of even the smallest dog.

The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

Zurbarán died penniless.

The final entry re Frans Hals, dated September 1, 1666, in the records of the Haarlem Paupers’ Fund — listing four florins for a gravedigger.

An immense nausea of billboards, Baudelaire spoke of.

Closing time in the gardens of the West, Cyril Connolly called it.

What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon? said Pangloss.

A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

Versailles, Edith Wharton was buried in.

January 8, 1713, Arcangelo Corelli died on.

Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey.

Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash.

The limpest of handshakes, Robert Graves said Pound had.

The mirror will not be looked into until you have returned.

Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning was once discovered about to spike his coffee with weed killer — presumably thinking it whiskey.

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Chloroform in print.

Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.

Oh, dear —

Eddie Grant, the pre–World War I third baseman, who graduated from Harvard — and who insisted on shouting I have it instead of I got it when chasing a fly ball.

And who as an infantry captain would be killed by machine gun fire in the Argonne Forest.

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

Said Mary McGrory.

Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.

Still to be read in the blank spaces on some of Raphael’s preliminary sketches for his Vatican stanze frescoes — drafts of love poems to his latest mistress.

Will Durant’s amusingly unworldly conclusion that the Sappho in Raphael’s Parnassus is — quote — too beautiful to be a lesbian.

Hark, Hark, the Lark! and Who Is Sylvia?

The word plagiarism — from the Latin for kidnapping.

Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.

Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible — while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.

Conclusions are the weak point of most authors.

If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.

Eugene Sue, most of whose widely read novels dealt with the poor and downtrodden.

Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:

Drawing, for an artist:

February 23, 1931, Nellie Melba died on.

Let me alone. Good day.

How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.

’Tis their will — that thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.

The most tragic of the poets.

Aristotle called Euripides.

Proust’s excessively lavish over-tipping.

Gide’s reputation as a cheapskate.

Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth — were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness — question mark.

A rejection of all that civilization has done.

Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

One never steps twice into the same Auden.

Seneca’s Thyestes, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.

Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent — was of pears simmered with cinnamon.

A good man — but he did not know how to paint.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head — it harmonises the soul.

The pain of rereading Twelfth Night after far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Old age is not for sissies.

Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

Leukemia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink died of.

Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.

Apollinaire, who was severely wounded in World War I.

December 8, 1918, Cpl. David Markson died on.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

The Rokeby Venus. Which was purchased in Yorkshire in the early 1800s for five hundred pounds.

Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson died in.

The Marquesas, Gauguin.

Diogenes, asking to be buried face downward —

Every man is condemned to death — but with an indefinite reprieve.

Hugo said.

Those who know do not speak.

Those who speak do not know.

Forty-two, Kierkegaard died at.

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

It would have been our pleasure to be bombed.

August 8, 1596, Hamnet Shakespeare died on.

July 11, 1649, Susanna Shakespeare Hall died on.

February 7, 1662, Judith Shakespeare Quinney died on.

Virgil’s ceaseless revisions of the Aeneid.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe — said whoever.

Please don’t get up, I’m only passing through.

No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?

Thy labours shall outlive thee.

Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.

Wondering when the last day may have passed—anywhere in the world — during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.

Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.

Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.

Late February or early March, 1945.

What see’st thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

His powers of mind have almost entirely left him; his late paintings are miserable; it is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties.

You don’t always make an out. Sometimes the pitcher gets you out.

In the long run we are all dead.

When I went to America, my very first inquiry was concerning Melville. There was some slight evidence that he was alive, and I heard from Mr. E. C. Stedman, who seemed much astonished at my interest in the subject, that Melville was dwelling somewhere in New York.

Charidas, what is it like down there?

Minor authors — who lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.

Those rare intellects who, not only without reward, but in miserable poverty, brought forth their works.

One must go on working. And one must have patience.

My time will come.

On van Gogh’s bier at Auvers-sur-Oise — clusters of golden sunflowers.

The report that Osip Mandelstam spent the last hours before his death in Siberia reading Petrarch — by firelight.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Verdi’s funeral — which according to his own wishes was conducted without music.

Though in fact he had asked that the score of his Te Deum, one of the Four Sacred Pieces, be placed in his coffin.

Regensburg, Johannes Kepler was buried in.

My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.

Kynge Arthur is nat dede but shall come agayne.

I’m cold, Snowden said. I’m cold.

For sundry doctrinal reasons, the Archbishop of Paris refused to sanction a Catholic burial for Colette.

Give me your arm, old toad;

I have often thought of death, but now it is never out of mind.

You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within.

The long littleness of life.

As he reclined at table, there arose a question what sort of death was best. At which he immediately, before anyone could speak, said, A sudden one.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

Merde pour la poésie.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Being William Dunbar — The fear of death distresses me.

And which Novelist is quite certain he has quoted before in his life.

Memento mori.

Any man if he is all alone becomes more aware of being lonely as he ages.

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.

The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play.

Lorenzo da Ponte’s memoirs — in which Mozart is practically never mentioned.

I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will.

With an ink too thick, with foul pens, with bad sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp, I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it!

Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.

Twenty-five years after his death, Poe’s remains were disinterred from what had been little better than a pauper’s grave and reburied more formally.

O that it were possible

Celan’s recollection that his mother had never had white hair.

Cézanne, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

Degas, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck:

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

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Saint Gildas the Wise, of Wales, who asked that at his death he be placed in a small boat and set adrift at sea.

Sophocles, re a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:

It is later than you know.

There is always more time than you anticipate.

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

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

I too have written some good books.

Having died they are not dead.

Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye:

Tiny drops of water will hollow out a rock.

Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language — is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?

Als ick kan?

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

Said H. G. Wells.

The world began without man, and it will end without him.

Swiftly the years, beyond recall.

— Reads the Arthur Waley translation of a Chinese fragment.

One man is born; another dies.

After death, nothing is.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

When Grandpa dies and his ashes are dropped into the ocean, may I have just a little bit of them? To put into something nice, so I can keep Grandpa with me for all time?

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

Quoth Horace. We are but dust and a shadow.

Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.

Unregarded age in corners thrown.

The worn copy of Donne’s verses, inked throughout with notes in Coleridge’s handwriting. And at the rear:

I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

Bhartrihari, fully fourteen hundred years ago, bemoaning the poverty of poets — in Sanskrit.

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Be patient now, my soul, thou hast endured worse than this.

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die?

Access to Roof for Emergency Only.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Als ick kan.