Jean Armour.
John Bunyan died of an undiagnosed fever after being caught on horseback in a storm.
Kepler died of an undiagnosed fever after a considerable journey on horseback to collect money he was owed.
Whistler died of a heart condition.
Jack Kerouac died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage from cirrhosis of the liver.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Astyanax.
As a Marine pilot in Korea, Ted Williams several times flew as Colonel John Glenn’s wing man.
Sophocles played ball with great skill, it says in Athenaeus.
He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman.
Reported a pupil of Chopin’s.
Stanislaus Joyce died of a heart condition at seventy. On Bloomsday.
James Thurber died of a brain tumor.
Beau Brummell died mad.
Antoine Roquentin.
Thomas Hobbes did translations of Homer into English in his late eighties.
Not particularly well.
Eight Miles of Books.
Aristotle, asked what grows old most swiftly:
Gratitude.
The Boudreau Shift.
Hobbes played the bass viol.
Ignazio Silone’s parents died in an earthquake.
James Laughlin once changed a flat tire for Gertrude Stein.
Samuel Beckett once sat through a New York vs. Houston doubleheader at Shea Stadium.
I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort.
Blake’s insistence that at the age of four he had seen God watching him through a window.
Amy Lowell died of a stroke.
Vesalius was condemned to death by the Inquisition for dissecting humans. But was permitted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in penance instead.
And then died en route home of overexposure after a shipwreck.
Sestos. Abydos.
St. Francis of Assisi probably died of malaria.
How vain it is, and how futile, to lament the dead.
Said Stesichorus.
William Burroughs killed his wife while trying to shoot a glass perched on her head à la William Tell.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead. From papyri and pyramid inscriptions dated as early as 1580 BC.
Or a contemporary variant on the latter, if Writer says so.
Writer incidentally doing his best here — insofar as his memory allows — not to repeat things he has included in his earlier work.
Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were mentioned in his last book also.
Burroughs died of heart failure.
Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.
Your last novel was a flop.
All of this preoccupation implying little more, presumably, than that Writer is turning older.
Stockholm, Greta Garbo’s ashes were buried near.
They’re going to cut a street through.
They would, Bill said.
Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head — so that he would be too embarrassed to leave his house.
Though with Writer also now recalling the refrain from Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, about the deaths of such as Chaucer and Lydgate and Henryson and Gower:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The fear of death distresses me.
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music.
Said Marlon Brando.
Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged heart.
Pound died of a blocked intestine.
Being less than surprised that Rouault began his career working at stained-glass windows.
She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
Otello. Verdi was seventy-four.
Falstaff. Verdi was eighty.
Office of the Dead.
The friendship of John Donne and Isaak Walton.
Rudolph Valentino died of a perforated ulcer.
Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow:
Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met.
Ben Shahn died of a heart attack after surgery.
Andy Warhol died after gallbladder surgery.
East Coker, for Eliot’s ashes.
Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Harvard:
Should an elephant teach zoology?
Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners.
John Donne. Anne Donne. Undone.
Camoëns died unknown and penniless in a plague.
A lieutenant of Alexander’s, before the Battle of Arbela:
Don’t think we fear their vast numbers, Sire. They’ll not stand the stink of goat that clings to us.
For centuries, in England:
The burial of a suicide under a high road, ideally at a crossroads.
And with a wooden stake driven into his/her heart.
Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about one of the Dempsey-Tunney fights.
Xanthippe was a shrew.
Living with her teaches me to get along with the rest of the world, Socrates said.
Gershwin died of a brain tumor.
Edward MacDowell died mad, probably from syphilis.
Manolete. Islero. Linares.
The wife of Johann Strauss, Jr., once asked Brahms for an autograph. Brahms sketched out the opening notations for the Blue Danube.
And signed them Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.
Wolfgang Pauli: You probably think these ideas are crazy.
Niels Bohr: Unfortunately they are not crazy enough.
Katyn.
Nanking.
Kyd’s scene in The Spanish Tragedy where Hieronimo finds the corpse of his son hanged from a tree in his garden.
Luciano Pavarotti’s inability to read music.
Ronsard died of gout.
Conan Doyle died of a heart condition.
Fichte once badly needed to borrow money from Kant.
Kant said no.
Frederick Exley died of a stroke.
Joanna Baillie.
Auden was known to show up at the opera in a stained tuxedo and bedroom slippers.