Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.

More than one owner of a significant personal library, in the early years after Gutenberg, made it plain that no printed volume would ever be a part of it.

The Times of London officially listed Robert Graves as killed in action in 1916.

Graves would live until 1985.

Ella Sagersdorf.

For most of his life, Beethoven changed addresses on an average of more than twice a year.

And was more than once sued by landlords for having scribbled notations all over his walls.

All men by nature desire to know.

Krakatoa.

Eliot was sixty-eight when he married his second wife Valerie. Who was thirty.

Du musst dein Leben andern.

Leigh Hunt once went to jail for libel.

Virginia Hill committed suicide.

Concierto de Aranjuez.

You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody’s lonely.

Xerxes, invading Greece, halted at the site of Troy in homage to its heroes. Looking on the Trojan War as a European invasion of Asia which justified Persia’s own present aggression.

Seven centuries afterward.

Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.

Là ci darem la mano.

How is Protagonist’s eyesight?

Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari’s story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.

Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?

Even if only from a good number of years back?

The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.

Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.

Arshile Gorky hanged himself.

Initially, the word metaphysics meant only that which came behind the Physics in the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.

Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find Leviathan selling, secondhand, for four times its original price:

It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.

Gidon Kremer.

For Protagonist’s literary past:

Protagonist: Isn’t it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies’ room?

Dylan Thomas: She’s probably in that other saloon across the street. Go buy her a drink and tell her I apologize for ignoring her, will you? She’ll let off less steam if it’s you instead of me.

William Ernest Henley lost a leg to bone disease.

Mikhail Bakhtin lost a leg to bone disease.

Melville’s older son Malcolm committed suicide at eighteen.

Sarah Gamp was William Faulkner’s favorite fictional character.

Dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

The Duchess of Medina Sidonia. Whom Reader once saw at zparador on the Costa del Sol, being escorted to jail after political protest.

Young Lochinvar.

Frank O’Hara died after being hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.

Unquestionably, Protagonist will have spent time in Spain.

Wolf Solent.

La Duquesa Roja.

Claude Lorrain was very nearly illiterate.

John Greenleaf Whittier to the contrary, the woman in Frederick, Maryland, who displayed a Union flag when Stonewall Jackson entered the town was a Mrs. Mary Quantrell.

Pushkin’s dramatic poem in which an envious Salieri poisons Mozart.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera based on same.

Dan Pagis. Nathan Zach.

Frank Stella: What you see is what you see.

Georg Buchner died of typhus in 1837, at twenty-three. Woyzeck would not be published until forty-two years later.

Who touches a hair of yon grey head

Dies like a dog! March on! he said.

Malcolm Melville had played on a local baseball team. This when Melville himself was already in the customs sheds, and with virtually all of his fiction ten and fifteen years behind him.

No image arises of the somber, disregarded author rooting on the sidelines at a game.

Michael Ventris died in a car crash.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.

Did the woman herself ever see the photograph?

Yeats died in southern France in 1939. His body was returned to Ireland on an Irish destroyer after World War II.

Pier Angeli committed suicide.

Joe Orton was murdered.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

Agnes von Kurowsky.

Now I know you. No field, no home, no wife, no woman — no friends, no love.

Jacques Louis David was repeatedly drawn to sketch prisoners being led to the guillotine.

Isadora Duncan was strangled when her long scarf became caught in a wheel of her open Bugatti.

God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

Linear B.

Dear me, I am about to become a god.

Karl Marx was an anti-Semite.

Karl Marx was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

Zyklon B.

Charles Martel.

Benjamin Robert Haydon committed suicide.

On the evidence, Shakespeare’s small Latin was plainly more than that.

Oft did I weary of wrestling with thee.

Carved an unknown galley slave into an oar.

And Rudyard Kipling into his desk.

At the house on the beach, what becomes of Protagonist’s path to the highway when the snows are heavier than those Reader has visualized?