Schopenhauer:

I admire and love Mozart, and go to all concerts where Beethoven’s symphonies are played, but — when one has heard much Rossini, everything else is ponderous in contrast.

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.

Said Robert Southey to Charlotte Bronte.

Chekhov was an anti-Semite.

Edith Wharton’s family owned the Chemical Bank of New York. Wharton lived with an entourage virtually like royalty.

Old enough to remember when more people could still quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow than any other American poet.

Longfellow to the contrary, however, Paul Revere never reached Lexington. In fact he was captured.

In another ostensibly religious work, Veronese included portraits of Titian, Tintoretto, Jacopo Bassano, and himself dressed as musicians.

Not to add several instantaneously recognizable Venetian courtesans.

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five.

Pliny the Elder advised sexual activity as a remedy for weak eyesight.

And for hoarseness.

Twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, Whitehead said.

It is my general impression that the editors of Partisan Review are capable, educated, intelligent, but have nothing to say. Said Leon Trotsky.

Cesar Franck died after being run down by a bus. His best pupil, Chausson, would be killed nine years later in a bicycle accident.

Richard Brautigan committed suicide.

In his late twenties Francis Thompson endured an almost dehumanizing poverty. At times, like Lovelace two-and-a-half centuries earlier, he picked through garbage to survive.

Hölderlin was read aloud at Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party.

Kol od ba-le-vah p’ni-mah

Ne-fesh y’hu-di bo-mi-ya.

Never to have been born is best.

Naming and Necessity.

Jonathan Swift left his money to found a hospital for the insane.

And died mad.

All art is quite useless.

Chancellor Rolin.

Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate.

Carl Andre once ate a five-dollar bill at the Cedar Tavern.

La Dama de Elche. Persephone’s thigh where Pluto clutches it in the Bernini. The right hand of Michelangelo’s David.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

I couldn’t read it. The human mind isn’t that complex.

Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

Katie King. The few extant photographs, ca. 1898.

And as fast as her time came she was delivered of a fair child, and they christened him Galahad.

Donatello’s Magdalen.

Alexander Pope was four and one-half feet tall. And a hunchback. And a cripple.

Leopardi was a hunchback and an invalid.

Pascal was a hypochondriac.

Cuautla, in Morelos. Where Zapata’s body was flung into the zocalo after his murder.

Forty years later Reader knew a young Indian woman from the same state who would insist he was still alive in the Sierras.

Quintilian was an anti-Semite.

Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney died in a car crash.

This long disease, my life.

That long malaise, my life.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have lived in Mexico.

Palestrina. Being the town near Rome where he was born. His real name having been Giovanni Pierluigi.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Unerased for Reader even after fifty full years without once having looked at it again: the final description in Nana.

Lucretius committed suicide.

Eliot’s first wife Vivien was in a mental institution for the nine years before her death in 1947.

Joyce’s daughter Lucia was in a mental institution for the forty-six years before her death in 1982.

James Joyce’s daughter.

Thersites. Who mocked.

It was the first Ptolemy, Ptolemy Soter, who was told by Euclid that there was no royal road to geometry.

Rilke never read a daily newspaper.

The man who is tired of London is tired of life.

Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi.

Pons asinorum.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

One of Sergei Esenin’s wives was Isadora Duncan. Another later married Meyerhold. The third was a granddaughter of Tolstoy.

Cithaeron.

Sappho’s poetry was burned at least three times by the Church. Fewer than seven hundred lines remain out of probably twelve thousand, with most of those forming only fragments.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters coming from one of such.

In the basement of the house on the beach, an old-style wood stove?

A fireplace, presumably part of the renovation?

Wood corded near the base of the dune outside?

Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.

Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide.

Wilkie Collins maintained two households simultaneously. Both with mistresses.

Lunar caustic.

Zbigniew Herbert.

Degas was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist also recalling sweltering recent summers when imprisoned in the city? Surely the beach, but even the gatehouse, a significant reprieve?

He has licked dust from the floor of every third-rate hostess in England.

Said Harold Frederic of Henry James.

Stendhal was an officer with Napoleon’s armies in the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Sebastian Dangerfield.

Jack London was illegitimate.

In Act II of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare allows Hector to mention Aristotle. Who will not be born until some nine hundred years after the fact.

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

According to legend, Li Po drowned when he fell out of a boat, drunk, leaning to kiss a reflection of the moon.

If a picture of the Virgin is to be any good, I must paint it from a drawing of a woman I sleep with. Said Stanley Spencer.