And sixty-eight at Part II.
Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.
In the sixth century BC.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
Said Kurt Vonnegut.
Has Novelist ever known many who could not contrive some way to keep the pot boiling during fallow stretches?
General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov.
Joseph Ignace Guillotin.
Sir Rudolf Bing was once robbed of a cheap watch he wore only for sentimental reasons. Zinka Milanov was infuriated:
The General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera does not display a twenty-dollar wristwatch!
The mugging in which Giuseppe di Stefano, at eighty-three, was quite badly injured — while being stripped of a gold chain he had been given by Maria Callas.
It was Beckett’s wife who took the call informing them that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. Her first reaction, even as she turned to tell him:
Quelle catastrophe!
Toledo, Judah Halevi was born in.
Córdoba, Maimonides.
Saint Benedict, essentially the founder of moderate monastic rule.
Whose earliest regulations as an abbot were so harsh that the monks tried to poison his wine.
In the dense mist
What is being shouted
Between hill and boat?
Beethoven’s brief period as a pupil of Hadyn’s:
I never learned anything from the man.
There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.
You always have to start somewhere or other.
Inconceivable nonsense.
Tchaikovsky called Das Rheingold.
Machiavelli’s interminable visits to prostitutes — described in unexpurgated detail in his correspondence.
Graham Greene’s — so compulsive that a biographer was able to reproduce a cryptic list, in Greene’s handwriting, of a favorite forty-seven.
Georges Simenon’s — whose autobiography speaks of as many as a thousand.
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Says a Flaubert letter.
Yeats evidently knew no music.
The word serendipity.
Coined by Horace Walpole, in a 1754 fairy story.
August 22, 1904, Kate Chopin died on.
August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
George Eliot’s instantaneous anger over any sort of anti-Semitic reference or joke.
Molière was on stage, performing in the role of the hypochondriac in his own last play Le Malade imaginaire, when he was stricken by the bursting blood vessel that caused his death a day later.
I hope I never get so old I get religious.
Quoth Ingmar Bergman.
Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.
Like their grandly perspicacious uncles — who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.
When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow — is it always the book?
Asked Lichtenberg.
Owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
Milton labeled critics.
Ménière’s disease, Swift suffered from.
Erysipelas, Herman Melville.
Chopin’s phthisis — which left him weighing less than one hundred pounds.
They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof.
Realizes Lear.
The central railway-station platform of destinies.
Blaise Cendrars called early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris.
Virginia Woolf’s suicide, for which she filled her pockets with stones before walking into the Ouse.
Wondering if anyone has ever noted how many stones — and what they might possibly have weighed?
Sleet falling;
Fathomless, infinite
Loneliness.
Verlaine was at most eight or nine feet away when he famously fired three shots at Rimbaud with a revolver — fortunately no more than wounding him in the wrist with the first and missing completely with the next two.
The painter of painters.
Manet called Velazquez.
A German equivalent of Tubby, Schubert’s nickname was, among his friends.
Not to be born is far best.
Wrote Sophocles.
Not to be born at all would be the best thing.
Wrote Theognis, at least a half-century earlier.
Richard Feynman’s conviction that as the perspective grows more and more distant, James Clerk Maxwell will loom ever larger as the single towering eminence of the nineteenth century.
The one truly great political figure of our age.
Einstein called Gandhi.
Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.
Achieved only after having first failed elementary algebra.
A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.
Asserted Proudhon.
Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.
March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.
Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.
Said Rogers Hornsby re the signing of Jackie Robinson.
I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!
Said Chekhov, late along.
Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.
And can poets down there still win prizes?
John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.
Freud’s addiction to cocaine.
Sherlock Holmes’.
Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.
Or indeed Noah’s wife.
The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.
At least four hundred years after such things existed in Hindu India.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.
Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.
The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides.
Who mentions not one of them in his history.
Johnson’s Lives of the Poets — which mentions none either.
Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.