dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck:
Als ick kan — The best I can do.
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
Saint Gildas the Wise, of Wales, who asked that at his death he be placed in a small boat and set adrift at sea.
Sophocles, re a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:
He said he could not help it; he would happily rather not be ninety years old.
It is later than you know.
Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock — after having broken off its hands.
There is always more time than you anticipate.
Said Malcolm Lowry. For whom there wasn’t.
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
— Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.
I too have written some good books.
Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.
Having died they are not dead.
Wrote Simonides of the Spartans slain at Plataea.
Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye:
I always made an awkward bow.
Tiny drops of water will hollow out a rock.
Lucretius wrote.
Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language — is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?
Als ick kan?
Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
Said H. G. Wells.
The world began without man, and it will end without him.
Said Lévi-Strauss.
Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.
— Reads the Arthur Waley translation of a Chinese fragment.
One man is born; another dies.
Being Euripides.
After death, nothing is.
Being Seneca.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Said Santayana.
When Grandpa dies and his ashes are dropped into the ocean, may I have just a little bit of them? To put into something nice, so I can keep Grandpa with me for all time?
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
Quoth Horace. We are but dust and a shadow.
Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.
Sophocles calls it.
Unregarded age in corners thrown.
Shakespeare echoes.
The worn copy of Donne’s verses, inked throughout with notes in Coleridge’s handwriting. And at the rear:
I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be sorry that I bescribbled your book.
I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.
Bhartrihari, fully fourteen hundred years ago, bemoaning the poverty of poets — in Sanskrit.
Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Be patient now, my soul, thou hast endured worse than this.
Odysseus once says.
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die? Asks someone in Aristophanes.
Access to Roof for Emergency Only.
Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Als ick kan.