Virgil was known to cough blood, presumably from tuberculosis.
Which is almost certainly what killed him.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
— Says Aeneid I. There are tears for passing things, and things mortal touch the mind.
Requiem. Threnody. Dead march.
Dickens died of a paralytic stroke. At dinner.
Mozart died of renal failure from nephritis. Or of a streptococcal infection. Or of rheumatic fever. Or of a cerebral hemorrhage. Or of mercury poisoning. Or of arsenic poisoning. Or of exhaustion.
Or of possible miscalculated bloodletting, like Raphael.
Like Byron.
What artists do cannot be called work.
Wanhope.
Only one person, his secretary, attended Liebniz’s funeral.
One.
Writer’s right-lung lobectomy and resected ribs.
The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. These things made me a painter, and I am grateful. Said Constable.
The little Marcel died of bronchial pneumonia, in addition to his eternal asthma.
Bach died of a stroke.
Donne died of consumption.
When the city I extol shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have faded into oblivion, my words shall remain.
Said Pindar.
Non omnis moriar. I shall not wholly die. Said Horace.
Per saecula omnia vivam. I shall live forever. Said Ovid.
Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.
Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is it that now sways the world?
— Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.
The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you. Said Marcus Aurelius.
Western wind, when will thou blow The small rain down can rain?
It is the business of the novelist to create characters. Said Alphonse Daudet.
Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they cannot be entirely dispensed with. Said Ortega.
If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.
Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred?
Nothing more or less than a read!
Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read?
About an old man’s preoccupations.
Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack.
Writer’s cancer.
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Then I go out at night to paint the stars. Says a van Gogh letter.
Farewell and be kind.