Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern’s age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist’s present.

Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?

Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.

Matisse called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a hoax.

Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.

I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.

Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.

A verray, parfit gentil knyght.

And as for Protagonist’s former wife?

Reader has decided to let her look like Simonetta Vespucci.

Who may have been painted by Botticelli as well as by Piero di Cosimo.

Christina Rossetti almost certainly died a virgin.

The undeniable sexual attraction that Dorothy Wordsworth felt for William.

What is all this about Irish wit and humor? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.

Are any of the books Protagonist is packing inscribed by their authors?

Or are those the ones he is more likely selling, for their added value?

Sapere aude.

Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.

Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.

Thy necessity is greater than mine.

Said Philip Sidney, in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.

Gottlob Frege.

The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in at is an Edward Hopper.

Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows, Reader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.

Hilaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.

John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylum. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.

No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.

We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.

Thought Heidegger.

The first translation of major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin Iliad, ca. 250 B.C., by Livius Andronicus.

Sheri Martinelli.

Diane Arbus committed suicide by opening her wrists in a bathtub.

Clare’s parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

My friends forsake me like a memory lost.

I am the self-consumer of my woes.

In Joseph Conrad’s view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.

Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.

Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.

When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from Oedipus at Colonus.

Which he was only then finishing.

Schleiermacher.

Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.

Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.

The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.

Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.

Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.

Irgun.

Honor, power, wealth, fame, love of women.

Algernon Swinburne’s father was an admiral.

When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; when I could support one, I no longer needed any.

Said Kant.

Why has Reader always automatically assumed that the skull beside his desk is a man’s?

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Elisabeth Schumann. Eleanor Steber. Elisabeth Soderstrom. Ebe Stignani. Elena Suliotis. Erna Sack.

Being a successful reader of poetry on stage, said Akhmatova, is not necessarily the same as being a writer of successful poetry.

Snorri Sturluson was assassinated.

Twenty American publishers rejected Elie WiesePs Night.

Browning’s Sordello contains 5983 lines. Tennyson said he understood two of them.

Holbein died of plague.

Percy Bridgman committed suicide.

Photographs of anyone other than his children, has Protagonist kept?

Of himself with?

T. E. Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.

Thomas Campion’s songs were essentially forgotten for well over two centuries.

But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

Igor Stravinsky was an anti-Semite.

Being sent to a dictionary at fifteen for eleemosynary on the first page of Tom Jones. Has Reader come upon the word twice since?

Give him a jugful and he will write one hundred poems. Said Tu Fu of Li Po.

He dozes in a wine shop

On a city street in Chang-an.

Saint Luke was hanged from an olive tree.

Or may have died a natural death at eighty-four.

I cannot survive on a miserable organist’s job, as your Master Bach did.

Johnny Keats’s piss-a-bed poetry, Byron called it.

Other women for Protagonist’s background, should Reader add?

A lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced? And even in repose seemed always moving?

Becky Sharp. Maggie Tulliver.

How many years past? How recently will Protagonist have ever seen her since?

Philip Rahv committed suicide.

Aesop was executed for embezzlement.

By the early Middle Ages, every third church in Europe claimed to possess splinters from the True Cross. Or the nails. Or thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Several heads of John the Baptist existed, and at least as many corpses of Mary Magdalen.