Tolstoy, in his diary, on George Bernard Shaw: His triviality is astounding.
By chance, Toscanini made an abrupt change of plans regarding a trip from New York to Italy in 1915.
And canceled passage on the Lusitania.
~ ~ ~
A reactionary bourgeois award, Pravda called Pasternak’s Nobel Prize.
Which he was forced to decline.
Jedwabne.
Evidently not one of the major Latin poets in Rome was born in Rome itself.
Among them, Seneca, Lucan, and Martial in fact came from Spain.
Vespasian, struggling to rise from his deathbed:
An emperor should die standing.
Saint Francis of Assisi, finding his own deathbed infested with mice—
Which he decided was amusing.
Sardanapalus.
If you’d like to hear something pleasant — the cost of living is very cheap in Hades.
Said Callimachus.
Leopold Bloom is not circumsized.
And has not had a bar mitzvah.
Salamanca, Unamuno died in.
Madrid, Ortega y Gasset.
Scriabin. Who would never handle money without first putting on gloves.
The legend that Diogenes, living in a barrel, saw a child drinking out of his hands — and threw away his cup.
The legend that Shakespeare began his London career by minding horses outside the theater.
A friend quotes from Macbeth: Is this a dagger which I see before me?
At which Malcolm Lowry: Naturally you realize he was tight as a tick when he wrote that?
Tennyson and Browning have adjacent graves in Westminster Abbey.
Pascal’s rotting teeth.
Van Gogh’s.
James Agee’s initial version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was rejected by Fortune magazine — which had assigned it.
Unfailingly given pause in recalling that Melville left school at twelve.
Or that English was essentially Jack Kerouac’s second language.
Guido di Pietro. Who became Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. And whose paintings were termed angelic.
Ergo: Fra Angelico.
Without doubt the greatest intellect in Western philosophy.
Spengler called Leibniz.
Petrarch was so esteemed in his own day that decades before his death, Arezzo passed a law that the house where he was born was never to be altered.
Red Cloud, Nebraska, Willa Cather spent her childhood in.
A volume of Andrei Voznesensky’s verse, which appeared when he was thirty-two, sold three hundred thousand copies via subscription before official publication.
In 1817, being sent at the age of five from India to England for schooling, Thackeray was on a ship that stopped for provisions at an island west of Africa. A servant led him to a garden and impressed upon him to remember the man they saw strolling there.
The island being St. Helena.
Hegel, at Jena in his mid-thirties, had a view of Napoleon also, on horseback practically under his window — only a day before French soldiers would terrify him by entering his rented room while plundering the city.
The version of Cassius’s suicide after the defeat at Philippi that says he used the same dagger with which he had helped to assassinate Caesar.
Nine in the second place means:
The axletrees are removed from the wagon.
The sentries on guard near the decomposing corpse of Polyneices in Antigone—
Whom Sophocles lets remind us that they have situated themselves upwind.
Braque’s father was a housepainter.
Baudelaire, still basically unknown, once wrote to Wagner praising his music but not including a return address:
Lest you might think I wanted something from you.
Michelangelo, designing the dome of St. Peter’s — and responding to the suggestion that he might outdo Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence:
In size. Not in beauty.
The poet shall compose nothing contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or just, or beautiful, or good, which are allowed by the state.
Said Plato.
For what other reason, truly, would an educated man go to the theater, except to see Menander?
Asked Plutarch.
Santa Maria del Fiore.
André Gide was repeatedly beaten up as a schoolboy. François Mauriac aussi.
Robert Herrick so admired Ben Jonson that he regularly spoke of him as Saint Ben.
Jacques Barzun’s utterly mystifying insistence that virtually no one has ever heard of Vico.
They rowed her in across the rolling foam—
The cruel, crawling foam.
Wrote Kingsley.
The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. Wrote Ruskin.
Santiago, Chile, Pablo Neruda died in.
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
After Shelley’s corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio, and his ashes transported for interment in the English Cemetery in Rome, Trelawny bought an adjacent plot.
And was buried there fifty-nine years later.
Joyce said he spent twenty thousand hours writing Ulysses.
Lakehurst, New Jersey. 7:25 P.M. May 6, 1937.
Carlyle, at eighty-four, reread all of Shakespeare.
Leonardo’s Paris Madonna of the Rocks. Leonardo’s London Madonna of the Rocks.
Delacroix’s Paris Medea. Delacroix’s Berlin Medea.
The Julian calendar lost eleven minutes and fourteen seconds each year. Adding up to approximately twelve days by the late sixteenth century.
The Gregorian calendar first began to replace the Julian in 1582. And will need one day’s correction 3,333 years from that date, which is to say in the year 4915.
Scapa Flow.
Reminding oneself that for all his lifelong pose of New England provincialism, Robert Frost not only spent two years in his mid-twenties as a special student at Harvard, but attended courses by George Santayana and William James.
Remembering that Gertrude Stein, at Radcliffe, studied with Santayana and James also.
I like it less than anything of yours I have read, Edmund Wilson told Nabokov re Lolita.
While later calling his translation of Eugene Onegin awkward, banal, clumsy, and disastrous.
Aeschylus was thirty years older than Sophocles. Sophocles was fifteen years older than Euripides.
Wondering what her stepbrothers Gerald and George Duckworth actually managed to do, sexually, to Virginia Woolf?
Schmucks with Underwoods, Jack Warner called writers.