What is the winter really like, precisely at ocean’s edge?

He stank so badly, though we were great chums

I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

Watching abstractedly before the dunes as the entire shore commences to disappear?

Roger van der Weyden signed none of his paintings.

Either as Roger van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture.

J

oyce was influential enough to be able to aid at least a dozen Jews in escaping from Nazi Germany. Hermann Broch among them.

Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiab.

It remains a scandal to philosophy that there is as yet no satisfactory proof of an external world, Kant said.

Does Protagonist continue to walk the beach at his usual hour now also?

But surely not at this time of year a woman who does the same?

Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi.

After his cremation, Gandhi’s ashes were scattered into the Ganges, considered sacred. At Allahabad.

Where it and the Jumna conjoin.

Ruth Kligman, who was thrown clear in the crash that killed Jackson Pollock and a friend of hers, later had an affair with Willem de Kooning.

And later had an affair with Franz Kline.

Caponegro. Latiolais.

Darling Jill.

Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that. A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

Doch das Sein — was ist das Sein?

Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin’s purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.

Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don’t touch the cloud-dweller.

Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.

Said Rousseau.

When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.

Kipling was an anti-Semite.

At thirty-five, Antonio Machado married a fifteen-year-old. Who died when Machado was thirty-eight.

Or possibly now someone he will never see closely at all, not coming toward him but moving in his same direction? And always a fair distance ahead?

Continuing on to become a kind of actualized vanishing point when Protagonist himself halts?

Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.

David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.

Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

Is Noah’s drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?

Avalokiteshvara.

Vanishing point.

She?

Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.

Hugh Casey shot himself.

Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.

Fly’s Photograph Gallery.

Arthur Symons on Mallarme:

He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.

Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.

Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest… when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

Ramon Mercader.

Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?

Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.

Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Moll Flanders.

My father’s a judge.

My mother pleaded her belly.

Sir Richard Burton, of the Kama Sutra, spoke twenty-nine languages.

Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Mrs. Hutchinson.

Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.

Plautus once worked in a flour mill.

Three years after Baudelaire’s death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.

There is no further word of her.

Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?

Patterned after whom?

Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.

Like Keats’s father.

The Aeneid is rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil’s assumption that his readers would recognize both.

Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.

The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.

Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.

Hannibal committed suicide via poison.

Murray Gell-Mann.

The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.

Civilization and Its Distant Tents.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

He had become a dirty bourgeois.

Lord, don’t help us. But don’t muck it up for us either.

Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.

Whistler was an anti-Semite.

Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.