William H. Bonney.

Levi-Strauss:

The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.

Jackson Pollock once held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks.

Work out your own salvation with diligence.

For all his madness, it would turn out that Holderlin had furtively kept all of Suzette Gontard’s letters throughout the forty years between her death and his own. Eighty years after that they would come to be published.

And somewhere men are laughing, and

somewhere children shout.

Tennyson said that scissors was the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.

Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.

Ronsard was so prodigally admired during his lifetime that both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots sent him gifts. And then was unread for two centuries.

Boswell’s practice of scribbling down every other word Johnson said irritated any number of their acquaintances. Ill-bred, Hester Thrale called him.

W. H. Davies lost a foot while jumping a freight train.

Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Said Pascal.

Pythagoras claimed to remember visiting Hades between his several alleged reincarnations.

And having seen Homer hanging from a tree and Hesiod in chains because of their disrespect for the gods.

In Gargantua, Epistemon makes the same visit. Reporting that Achilles is a beggar, Hector supports himself by scraping pots in a kitchen, Helen is a madame, Alexander darns socks, Cleopatra sells onions, and King Arthur cleans grease out of hatbands.

According to Xenophanes, Pythagoras also once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

At least one more for Protagonist’s background?

Again then, not infinitely long past. A woman named Susan, who edited books. But also snapped some photographs of him that will presumably now remain the last he will ever have had taken.

Brett Ashley.

Anna Wickham committed suicide.

Stephen Foster died after a fall in a rooming house on the Bowery.

He owned thirty-eight cents.

Seneca was an anti-Semite.

Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Roman Jakobson. Michel Leiris. Julia Kristeva. Phillipe Sollers. Louis Althusser. Paul Ricoeur.

All variously attended seminars of Jacques Lacan’s.

Yannis Ritsos. Iannis Xenakis.

Jeanne Hebuterne, with child, jumped from a window on the morning after Modigliani’s death.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Are there things to be put down?

David Smith died in a car crash.

The sitter for the Mona Lisa was one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Francesco del Giocondo.

Presumably her eyebrows were plucked.

James Russell Lowell was an anti-Semite.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times.

Trying to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

Not to call. Not to go. Not to do.

Or was he not even that fully aware of the process until he found it to be a fait accompli?

The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.

Cosimo Tura died in a poorhouse.

Discordia concors.

Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant.

Shakespeare was eighteen.

Casta diva.

Aristotle was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad and died in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth.

Ergo having been either sixty-two or sixty-three.

He may also have died a suicide. Diogenes Laertius says he drank wolfsbane. Though most other sources blame chronic indigestion.

The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold two copies.

Guido Reni.

Who was once as widely admired as Ronsard.

The reign of the shopwindow, Ortega called it as long ago as in 1930.

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels — bring home.

It cost Baudelaire five years of letters and poems to coax Madame Sabatier into bed. Once. Whatever calamity occurred, the affair was terminated on the same night.

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

From those brown hills have melted into spring.

Arnold Schoenberg was once turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship.

Pier della Vigna committed suicide after Frederick II had him blinded. Dante confronts him with much sympathy in the Inferno.

Raymond Radiguet wrote Devil in the Flesh at seventeen. And was dead at twenty.

Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.

Wagner was an anti-Semite.

Mariano Azuela, as a physician, rode with Pancho Villa.

Dies Irae.

Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.

Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.

The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.

Dasjudentum in derMusik.

Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I. Paths of Glory was his only book.

At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.

With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality.

Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.

Ignis fatuus.

Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.

And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.

Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.