Without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew, said Byron after Shelley’s death.
Presumably not remembering that Shelley had deserted Harriet, nineteen and four months pregnant, to run off with Mary, also pregnant — and leaving Harriet to drown herself less than two years later.
Enrico Fermi’s wife was a Jew. When the family left an increasingly anti-Semitic Italy to accept his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, instead of returning they sailed directly to New York — having made plans with virtually no word to anyone beforehand.
Edmund Spenser died in poverty.
But was buried in Westminster Abbey very near Chaucer.
Tom Paine died in poverty.
Five people attended his funeral.
For years, following Pearl Harbor, the Metropolitan Opera left Madame Butterfly off its schedule.
Why did Saint Paul not date any of his letters?
Heinrich Böll was wounded three times as a conscripted German infantryman in World War II.
Debussy, on the personality of Proust:
A bit of the concierge.
Louis Norman Newsom.
A past which was never a present, the historian Grote called the romanticized era of the Trojan War.
Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser were at Vassar together.
Being annoyed at Aristotle for mentioning that someone once accused Euripides of having bad breath.
Or does Author more likely mean being amused at being annoyed?
Yet in either instance, why, still, is Author so lacking in energy?
In fact why has Author now and again even caught himself taking a nap, which he cannot recall having ever done before in his entire adult life?
Like his younger grandchildren, for heaven’s sake.
Yeats once proposed marriage to Maud Gonne and was turned down.
And in no time thereafter proposed to her daughter.
Whistler did not get married until he was fifty-four.
Edmund Wilson managed to go through life without reading Don Quixote.
And through a full ten-year period without paying his income tax.
Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth — who turned Beethoven to face the audience so that he might see the applause.
A fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
Bertrand Russell called Christianity.
Emile Zola’s first English publisher spent three months in jail for obscenity.
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata was once banned from the mails by the United States Postal Service.
Puppies and first operas should be drowned.
Said Carl Maria von Weber.
No painting by Rogier van der Weyden is signed.
No painting by Hugo van der Goes is signed.
William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.
And was introduced as a winner of the Mobil Prize.
Gerard de Nerval spent much of the last decade and a half of his life in and out of mental institutions.
Antwerp, Rubens died in.
Tacitus, when young, defending other young writers against the eternal Old Guard:
What is different is not necessarily worse.
Julia Ward Howe was paid five dollars by the Atlantic Monthly for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Eliot used custom-made umbrellas with deliberately outsize handles.
So that no one would take one from a cloakroom by mistake, he told Herbert Read.
Julian Schnabel’s claim to The New York Times that his peers among painters were Duccio, Giotto, and van Gogh.
Gabriele Fallopio.
Bartolommeo Eustachio.
Pomes, Bronson Alcott said Whitman pronounced it.
Why is it said of a batter in baseball that he flied out rather than that he flew out?
Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
Tolstoy. Tchaikovsky. Lenin. Gorky. Rilke. Einstein.
Each of whom posed for a portrait by Leonid Pasternak.
Plutarch’s report of an epidemic of women’s suicides in Miletus.
And of a law enacted that all suicides must thenceforth be carried naked through the city before burial.
At which the suicides cease.
Theo van Gogh once asked Camille Pissarro to take in Vincent as a boarder.
Pissarro’s wife declined to have such an unbalanced individual at loose among her young children.
Amelia Earhart flied the Atlantic?
Wondering if youngsters still read The Count of Monte Cristo.
Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.
Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.
One should always read with a pen in one’s hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals.
Dickens’ best friend when, at twelve, he worked in the blacking factory:
A boy named Bob Fagin.
Verdi wrote Il Trovatore and La Traviata in less than a month each.
As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge them.
Said Tecumseh.
Several of Montaigne’s ancestors — Jews, on his mother’s side — had been burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition.
It is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them.
Said Montaigne himself not unreasonably.
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Which Byron, Scott, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Thackeray, Rossetti, Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson all admired.
Picasso. Joan Mini. Philip Guston. Willem de Kooning.
Who were all devoted to Krazy Kat.
Pomes Penyeach.
Sophocles, in old age, on finally being free from sexual urgings:
Like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.
Pope Leo X, to Sebastiano del Piombo, as to why he was holding off on commissions for Michelangelo:
There is absolutely no getting on with the man.
Pope Clement VII, a decade later:
When Buonarroti comes to see me, I always take a seat and bid him be seated himself at once — feeling positive that he will do so without leave or license otherwise.
On one of his visits to the wreck of his ship early in the novel, Robinson Crusoe finds gold — but quickly realizes it is of no value to him at all.