Remembering a lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced.

Remembering a Josie. And a Liz. And a Susan.

Marina Tsvetayeva hanged herself. And was buried no one knows where.

C. S. Lewis, on overly romanticizing the distant past: Think of a world without anesthetics.

A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

Will Protagonist have ever found flowers?

The woman, bearing any?

Four of Freud’s five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.

Four.

Aeschylus was a foot soldier at Marathon. And wanted that, rather than his plays, noted in his epitaph.

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

And only the day before yesterday, once having seemed.

Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa.

Remembering Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci.

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down, yea, we wept.

Was Peter Warlock the only serious composer who ever committed suicide?

Tchaikovsky and Schumann and Hugo Wolf having tried, but unsuccessfully.

Berlioz also, though being histrionic only.

Who is the woman at the grave?

Erinna ofTelos.

Chaucer was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey. Simply having lived in Westminster.

I have come to this place because.

Are Saint Francis of Assisi’s stigmata the earliest ever recorded?

Shakespeare’s mother and father were illiterate. And only one of his two daughters, Susanna, could sign her name. The other, Judith, made a mark.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His one son, Hamnet, Judith’s twin, died at eleven.

Before certain dawns at the gatehouse, like a windborne echo out of Protagonist’s own childhood, the wailing of a far-off train?

Mitigating, will it, the morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before?

Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?

Remembering yet others?

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

Some even now dead?

Nonetheless.

Did it ever, once, enter even Protagonist’s bleakest conjecturings that he would finish out his life alone?

Katherine Hamlet.

Of making many books there is no end.

I have not read a novel in any language in very many years, Joyce once mentioned.

Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.

And then walked home and took two days to die.

No survivor could recall having ever seen a single bird flying near any of the Nazi death camps.

Arbeit macht frei.

Mozart, the Ave, verum corpus.

A street in Paris, the late 1890s:

Madame Melba, you don’t know who I am? I’m Oscar Wilde, and I’m going to do a terrible thing. I’m going to ask you for money.

Dostoievsky was an anti-Semite.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

Emma Bovary.

Anna Karenina.

Othello.

Jocasta.

Brünnhilde.

Hedda Gabler.

Romeo and Juliet.

Werther.

Dido.

Cio-Cio-San.

Antigone and Haemon.

Miss Julie.

Axel Heyst.

Quentin Compson.

Aïda.

Inspector Javert.

Mynheer Peeperkorn. Leo Naphta.

Smerdyakov.

Rudolf Virag.

Edna Pontellier.

Hero.

Manrico’s Leonora.

Cheri.

Goneril.

Richard Cory.

McWatt.

Tosca.

Stavrogin. Kirillov.

Martin Eden.

Hurstwood.

Pyramus and Thisbe.

Roithamer.

Pierre Glendinning.

Winnie Verloc.

George Wilson.

Hedvig Ekdal.

Christine Mannon. Orin Mannon.

Willy Loman.

Senta.

Peter Kien.

Maggie Johnson.

Peter Grimes.

Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter.

Svidrigailov.

James O. Incandenza.

Konstantin Treplev.

Bartleby.

Septimus Smith.

Deirdre.

Seymour Glass.

Ophelia.

Samson.

Eustacia Vye.

Phaedra.

Alcestis.

Launcelot.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His last surviving grandchild, Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth, would live until 1670.

But leaving no further descendants.

A daughter of Dante’s, called Antonia, went into a nunnery at his death.

And adopted the name Sister Beatrice.

Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.

Jesus? he murmured, Jesus — of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.

Protagonist’s children?

With Reader well aware that he has categorically not thought that through either.

As with how much monumentally else?

Nine hundred and sixty Jews committed suicide at Masada, in 73 A.D., rather than surrender to the Roman legions that had lately sacked Jerusalem.

Two small rough orange stones.

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Virgil died at fifty. Shakespeare was fifty-two. Dante, fifty-six.

Petrarch, seventy, died at his desk. Having been reading.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

At modest estimate, at least 40 percent of the entire population of Europe was annihilated during the four years of the Black Death.

His inevitable portage of cartons? Beside a stairway to no passage?

In accommodations at a derelict graveyard? Where nobody comes, where nobody calls?

Now are fields of corn where Troy once was.

Dead?

She?

I would give you some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.

Vanishing point.

Toward what final grievous contemplation amid the disarray?