Not to add Christ’s foreskin.

Philip Larkin:

I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

Kristallnacht.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the first light of morning after having sat up all night reading a new translation of the Aeneid.

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it.

None of Andrew Marvell’s best poems was published in his lifetime.

The Queen of Pentacles, Reversed: Certain Evil, a suspicious Woman, a Woman justly regarded with Suspicion, Doubt, Mistrust.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite.

Who even well into World War II was still calling for the extermination of every Jew in Europe.

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.

Alcuin.

Because of Homer, Troy exerted such an enduring appeal that Julius Caesar contrived to trace his lineage back to its supposed survivors.

A millennium later Geoffrey of Monmouth would do the same for the kings of England.

At thirty-six, Dante was banished from Florence under penalty of death. In his twenty remaining years he would never be back.

Renzo and Lucia.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

The Laocobn was come upon by workmen digging in a vineyard not far from the Colosseum in 1506. In no time, Michelangelo was at the scene. And identified it at once, from descriptions in the elder Pliny.

Shakespeare wanted art.

Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go mad.

Said Nijinsky, mad.

J. Alfred Prufrock: full of high sentence.

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford: ful of hy sentence.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Said Eliot.

Sartre and Albert Schweitzer were cousins.

William Inge committed suicide.

Kiri Te Kanawa. Keri Hulme.

Did Protagonist leave a forwarding address?

Once, certainly, more of an existence than these cartons and the caw of seagulls?

Beckett wrote Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Waiting for Godot in less than two years in the late 1940s.

While living on virtually no money other than the few centimes his wife earned by dressmaking.

Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.

As did Wordsworth.

As did Tennessee Williams.

The Unnamed.

In the house on the beach Protagonist is naturally paying rent. In the house at the cemetery, which Reader has thought of as abandoned, is he living more or less illegally?

Protagonist as a squatter?

Jim don’t know nobody in China.

When Dickens, at twelve, worked from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M., six days a week, at the blacking factory, he also walked an hour each way to and from his family’s Camden Town slum.

And spent Sunday visiting his father in debtor’s prison.

What shall I do for pretty girls

Now my old bawd is dead?

Mahatma Gandhi: I see no virtue in being uninformed.

One of Max Planck’s sons was executed for plotting against Hitler.

Housman published a volume entitled Last Poems in 1922.

And lived until 1936.

I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.

Or could Protagonist have been given use of the gatehouse in return for essentially nonexistent custodial duties?

Watchman, what of the night?

Richard Strauss was an anti-Semite.

Brutus committed suicide after the defeat by Antony and Octavian by throwing himself on his sword. Antony removed his own cape to cover the body.

Cassius forced a servant to kill him after the same rout.

I am completely alone here now.

Captured by Moorish pirates at sea, Cervantes spent five years as a slave before being ransomed.

Plato finished the Laws in his late seventies, among other things sanctioning the death penalty for those who question the state religion.

Did he stop to remember how and why Socrates had died fifty years before?

Brandeis. Cardozo. Frankfurter.

Readers were so anxious over the fate of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop that six thousand of them in New York alone actually met the ship carrying the novel’s final installment.

Sir Thomas Browne wished that men could reproduce without intercourse. Like trees, he suggested. Fathering twelve children nevertheless.

Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

There is no known portrait of Anne Bradstreet.

Horace was in fact one of Brutus’s officers in Macedonia. But made his way back to Italy safely.

Erasmus was an anti-Semite.

Photographs of Protagonist with?

Tiresias concluded that 90 percent of the pleasure in sex was woman’s.

For which presumption Hera blinded him. Though in compensation Zeus gave him second sight.

Someone else for Protagonist’s past?

Also from some time ago. A woman named Josie, who taught. And so reminded him of a certain Modigliani nude that he tacked up a reproduction of the painting as a kind of talisman.

Molly Bloom. Daisy Buchanan. Isabel Archer.

Euripides’ mother was a fruit seller.

For years, Defoe was a hosier.

Where was Jesus between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine?

The mobled queen.

Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman went to Dodger games at Ebbets Field together.

Kant was only five feet tall. Wagner was very little taller.

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

Elfriede Heidegger would appear to have been a considerably better-looking woman than Hannah Arendt.

Quanah Parker.

Byron went into permanent exile from England in late April of 1816, near Passover. One of the last London friends he saw was the composer Isaac Nathan.

Who brought him a farewell gift of matzos.

Romain Gary committed suicide. As had his wife Jean Seberg a year earlier.