The greatest anything recording?
Selah. Absolutely, all the illimitable connotations of Einstein’s cosmic Oy, vey Author hereby personally endows it with — a terminal desolation and despair.
Done? Done. Beware Selah.
Ravenna, Dante died in.
Brundisium, Virgil.
Chalcis, in Euboea — Aristotle.
For decades, at his most famous, Isaac Bashevis Singer kept his number listed in the Manhattan telephone directory.
As did Auden. And Allen Ginsberg.
Walter Pater’s habit of sometimes muttering Botticelli to himself — over and over — almost as a kind of incantation.
Molly Bloom’s familiarity with at least one episode in Rabelais — whom Joyce would nonetheless later persist in denying he had ever read.
Obscure, muddled, nervous, and confused.
Stated an official Prussian academic assessment of Hegel’s lectures.
Putridity and corruption.
Stated Kierkegaard re their published versions.
King Oliver. Who spent the last years of his life as a pool-hall attendant.
A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.
Said Kenneth Tynan.
Salt Lake City, 1868—evidently the last insistently voiced claim of having seen the Wandering Jew.
Bessie Smith’s grave in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania — which was without a headstone for thirty-three years. One of those who finally arranged for one having been Janis Joplin.
Inverness, Florida, Ted Williams died in.
Age.
Dammit.
Also being the cause of this new recent lightheadedness, Author is certain.
Moments in which whatever he’d had in mind seems to have almost sneakily floated off someplace just out of reach, flickering there — even taunting him.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
An upside-down Matisse.
Beethoven’s Tenth, Brahms’ First was spoken of as.
For all the renown achieved by many, painters and sculptors in antiquity were considered little better than manual workers on a level with blacksmiths or shoemakers.
Cf. Plutarch: No well-born youth would want to be Phidias or Polyclitus, however much he may admire their art.
Or even in the Renaissance, the difference between a sculptor and a common stonecutter, which eluded Michelangelo’s magistrate father — and who considered his son’s elected career demeaning.
Muddling among old books has the quality of a sedative, and saves the tear and wear of an overwrought brain.
Said Scott.
The tradition that there was no one in fourteenth-century Florence who could not read — that even the donkey-cart driver could recite Dante.
The legend that a popular early Italian typeface, not too long after Gutenberg, was based on the handwriting of Petrarch.
Is my swan costume ready, please?
Asked Anna Pavlova on her deathbed.
According to his own wish, Liszt’s funeral was conducted without music.
Liszt’s.
Mais toujours seul; sans famine; même, quelle langue parlais-je?
An Oldsmobile convertible, Jackson Pollock was driving.
A Facel Vega, Camus was riding in. Michel Gallimard was doing the driving.
Fireplace Road, East Hampton. 10:15 P.M. August II, 1956.
National Route 5, Petit-Villeblevin. 1:54 P.M. January 4, 1960.
How long did the Virgin Mary survive Jesus?
How long before the Crucifixion had her husband, Joseph, died?
Theodore Roethke’s poem about the possibility that he would spend time locked away for madness in heaven as he did in life.
But there sharing it with the likes of Blake, and Clare, and Christopher Smart.
Gissing, clenching his teeth in despair at sight of a Tibullus priced at sixpence on a bookstall — sixpence being every cent he owned in the world.
The architect of Chartres Cathedral.
Unknown.
The invention of the compass, in use ca. 1200.
Unattributed.
Constable’s habit of frequently making detailed notes on the reverse of his sketches for landscapes — place, date, time, weather. And once:
Lovely. So much so that I could not paint for looking.
Somebody is living on this beach.
Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.
Said Wittgenstein, leaving it.
Rossini, shown a Mozart score in Mozart’s own hand:
And going to his knees to kiss the sheets.
Education is the best viaticum for old age.
Diogenes Laërtius says Aristotle said.
Dickens was the last mourner to turn aside from Thackeray’s grave.
And then walked off alone.
For there is such a little time that your youth will last — such a little time.
Says someone in Dorian Gray.
The legend that Rilke died after being pricked by the thorn of a rose.
Actually, from leukemia.
Valmont, near Glion, Switzerland. 3:30 A.M. December 29, 1926.
Where are those who were in this world before us? Go to the cemetery and look at them.
Said Anon. in the twelfth century.
The ways we miss our lives are life.
Methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.
Said Donne, in Biathanatos.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story
Said Isak Dinesen.
On the tomb of Esteban Murillo in Seville: Vive moriturus. Live as though about to die.
No one truly believes in his own death.
Said Freud.
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. Says someone in The Magic Mountain.
As many as thirty thousand people may have attended Beethoven’s funeral.
Brancusi. Soutine. Léger. Vlaminck. André Derain. Jacques Lipchitz. Suzanne Valadon. Kees van Dongen. Picasso.
All of whom attended Modigliani’s — after his death in a paupers’ ward.
I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanatoriums.
Said Scott.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Says William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers: The fear of death distresses me.
Which Author suspects he has quoted before in his life.
As late as in the mid-nineteenth century, shepherds in the neighborhood of Marathon insisted that the clash of swords and the cries of horses could still be heard after the fall of darkness on the plain.