Watching the burning of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Scipio the Younger quoted Homer on the fall of Troy — and then wept.
At realization of Rome’s own mortality, Polybius says.
Longevity all too often means not a long life, but a long death.
Said Democritus.
We ought to leave when the play grows wearisome.
Said Cicero.
Likewise Writer’s pinched nerve.
We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
I am real! said Alice, and began to cry.
Cervantes died of diabetes.
Or of cirrhosis of the liver.
Blake died of gallstones.
Scipio the Younger having been a grandson, not a son.
The hearsay, first recorded by a Stratford vicar fifty years later, that Shakespeare died of a fever after a night’s carousing with Jonson and Michael Drayton.
Dostoievsky died of a lung hemorrhage.
Tolstoy died of pneumonia, with a nudge from age.
Sir Thomas Browne’s will asked that his copy of Horace be placed on his coffin in the grave.
Botticelli spent his last years on crutches.
And on charity.
Botticelli.
Niels Bohr died of a stroke.
Why is there no explanation in Deuteronomy for Moses being made to die after Pisgah and not being permitted to cross over into the Promised Land?
How many People of Israel were there, in the Exodus?
Picasso died of heart failure, in part brought on by acutely congested lungs.
Matisse died after years as an invalid following operations for duodenal cancer.
La Derelitta.
But no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.
Beethoven died of dropsy, after having gone through pneumonia and jaundice.
Franz Grillparzer wrote Beethoven’s eulogy. Schubert participated in the funeral.
Twenty months later Grillparzer wrote Schubert’s epitaph.
Schwanengesang.
The Grosse Fuge.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
So many are dead that were young.
Or yet again, Writer’s sciatica.
Plato died at eighty or eighty-one, while attending a wedding.
The sun is larger than the Peloponnesus.
Allowed Anaxagoras.
This story of Jesus has helped us a lot.
Allowed Pope Leo X.
Or sometimes of course even a comedy of a sort, if Writer says so.
Death’s Jest-Book.
Only three people followed Stendhal’s bier.
His longest obituary contained three lines.
One misspelled his name.
Three.
There is no contemporary reference to François Villon after January of 1463, when he was thirty-two and had already at least twice been arrested for having killed.
Nothing has ever modified the assumption that he died either at blade thrust or on a gallows, however.
François Villon.
Some few decades after its opening, the bones of Voltaire and Rousseau were stolen from the Panthéon.
And discarded no one knows where.
St. Teresa of Lisieux died of tuberculosis.
St. Teresa of Ávila died of a lung hemorrhage.
Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.
Or even his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake, if Writer so decides.
If only by way of it fitting no other category anyone might suggest.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
It is difficult to find those places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there.
Said Strabo of the lost past.
Possibly even then thinking of Ophir.
Nobody comes. Nobody calls.
Goethe died of what began as a chest cold.
Emily Dickinson died of Bright’s disease.
And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.
Writer’s silent heart attack.
The legend that Pythagoras starved himself to death.
The legend that Diogenes committed suicide simply by holding his breath.
Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain.
Says an Antigone chorus re man’s estate.
It seems to us that spring has gone out of the year.
Said Pericles, honoring war dead.
Dante probably died of malaria.
Raphael died of an unsolved fever.
Or more probably from excessive bloodletting by his physicians.
Ille hic est Raphael.
Virgil was known to cough blood, presumably from tuberculosis.
Which is almost certainly what killed him.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
— Says Aeneid I. There are tears for passing things, and things mortal touch the mind.
Requiem. Threnody. Dead march.
Dickens died of a paralytic stroke. At dinner.
Mozart died of renal failure from nephritis. Or of a streptococcal infection. Or of rheumatic fever. Or of a cerebral hemorrhage. Or of mercury poisoning. Or of arsenic poisoning. Or of exhaustion.
Or of possible miscalculated bloodletting, like Raphael.
Like Byron.
What artists do cannot be called work.
Wanhope.
Only one person, his secretary, attended Liebniz’s funeral.
One.
Writer’s right-lung lobectomy and resected ribs.
The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. These things made me a painter, and I am grateful.
Said Constable.
The little Marcel died of bronchial pneumonia, in addition to his eternal asthma.
Bach died of a stroke.
Donne died of consumption.
When the city I extol shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have faded into oblivion, my words shall remain.
Said Pindar.
Non omnis moriar. I shall not wholly die.
Said Horace.
Per saecula omnia vivam. I shall live forever.
Said Ovid.
Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.
Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is it that now sways the world?
— Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.