Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping.
For the World, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall; and a place not to live, but to Dye in.
Says Browne in the Religio Medici.
Cola di Rienzi’s father was a saloonkeeper.
Django Reinhardt spent his childhood in a Gypsy caravan.
And was considerably less than literate.
César Vallejo died of an intestinal infection.
I’ve been reading Cousin Bette. I’ve been reading it all summer. I may never finish.
William Kapell died in a plane crash.
Dinu Lipatti died of lymphogranulomatosis.
Archytas, who invented the baby’s rattle.
Which Aristotle actually takes note of. In Politics VIII 6, 1340b 25–28.
Chekhov died of consumption.
Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf at least once played the violin in a string quartet in which two of the other performers were Mozart and Haydn.
Beaumarchais died of a stroke.
Alain-Fournier was killed in action in France less than two months into World War I.
Protesilaus, in Iliad II. The first Greek to leap from the ships onto Trojan soil.
And the first slain.
Pylaemenes. Who is fatally speared at the collarbone by Menelaus in Iliad V.
And is inadvertently shown alive again in Iliad XIII.
He fell, immortal in a bulletin.
East Tenth Street in Manhattan, Adelina Patti grew up on.
There is no hippopotamus in this lecture room at the present moment.
Lamarck died blind.
And was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Gehenna.
Isaac Newton died of complications from a kidney stone.
Ramanujan died of tuberculosis.
Badges? I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges.
One of St. Jerome’s letters to St. Augustine took nine years to be delivered.
Capitoline. Palatine. Aventine. Caelian. Esquiline. Viminal. Quirinal.
What existed before the Big Bang?
Where?
Exclude God from your response.
Camille Pissarro was poverty-stricken for much of his working career.
Alfred Sisley was perhaps worse off, and for longer.
William Goyen died of leukemia.
Fragonard’s The Swing.
Which William Carlos Williams had the impression was Watteau’s.
Plato talked too much, Diogenes said.
While dismissing Socrates as a lunatic altogether.
Erasmus was indisputably the most famous author of his day. Thomas More even admitted to being thrilled that the very fact of their friendship would help keep his own name alive with posterity.
A piece of dreck, Luther on the other hand called him.
I, O Plato, see a table and a cup. But I see no tableness or cupness.
Dickens’ astonishing manic walks. Of as many as twenty-five miles—and at a headlong pace.
Oedipus Rex did not win first prize in the dramatic competition in the year when it was first presented.
Any contemporary philosopher who ventured to compare himself with Leibniz could at best wind up wishing he had a quiet corner to go die in, said Diderot.
William Wycherley married a second wife, far younger than he, at seventy-five.
And died eleven days later.
George Herbert died of consumption.
The most odious of small creeping things, Landor called critics.
A walk? What on earth for?
Asked Auden at someone’s country home.
Dizzy Dean had less than a fourth-grade education.
But a post-doctoral sense of the joys of that game, said Marianne Moore.
Hemingway, on Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason:
If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier.
Disraeli said he had read Pride and Prejudice at least sixteen times.
The straight line predominates in nature.
Ingres once said.
Only curved lines are to be found in nature.
Ingres once said.
Maud Gonne was six feet tall.
Akhmatova was five feet eleven.
Jessica Mitford died of brain cancer.
Ellen Glasgow was buried in the same coffin as the exhumed remains of her two favorite dogs.
Venus Pudica. Venus Anadyomene.
Absolute reason expired at eleven o’clock last night.
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones.
—Wrote Beaumont re Westminster Abbey.
Roger Martin du Gard died of a heart condition.
Arthur Honegger died of a heart condition.
Henry James ill-advisedly took an author’s curtain call on the opening night of his play Guy Domville.
And was hissed.
The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29–30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone—
A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.
Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.
Rameau died of typhoid fever.
Lovis Corinth.
Rilke wrote standing up.
Lewis Carroll wrote standing up.
Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.
Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.
Writer is sitting.
Jens Peter Jacobsen died of tuberculosis.
Balzac often worked for sixteen or eighteen hours consecutively, generally beginning at midnight.
Awash in coffee.
Gibbon died of infectious complications from hydrocele.
Contemporary architecture is basically a bore.
Writer sometimes also talks to himself.
As did Yeats.
As did Yeats even walking the streets of Dublin.
Mad as the mist and snow.
Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.
In a book without characters.
As noted, not being a character but the author, here.
We are and we are not.
Said Heraclitus.
Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident preoccupations.
How frequently was Anon. a woman?
Marcel Duchamp died of prostate cancer.
Already condemned by lung cancer, Duke Ellington died of pneumonia.
The word ghetto originally meant foundry.
Until the Jews of Venice were forced to live on an island that had previously been the site of one.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
Heraclitus additionally said.
Thales, solving the height of the pyramids:
Simply by measuring their shadows precisely when his own shadow matched his height.
The legend that as a young man Leonardo was so strong he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands.
Robert Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.
Fray Luis de Léon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition:
As I was saying . . .
Hey, Dad, hot this for me, please?
A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity, Johnson said.
Disgusting eating habits, there or elsewhere, Boswell says Johnson had.
Roald Dahl died of leukemia.
There can be no doubt that there is something peculiar in the condition of the English retina.
Said Taine, viewing a first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art.
I hear a white horse on the way.
G. K. Chesterton died of heart failure.
Hilaire Belloc died, senile, at eighty-three, when he set his clothing on fire by spilling coal from a grate.<
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Hardy’s father was a stonemason.
Turner’s mother died mad.
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
On radio, the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne:
Being the signal to the European underground that the D-Day invasion was underway.
Jane! Jane! Jane!
Filippo Lippi died of quinsy.
Account for Joan of Arc.
According to Vasari, ordinary citizens in Florence were so impressed by a Madonna of Cimabue’s that it was actually carried in a procession from his workshop to Santa Trinità.
Heralded by trumpets.
It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.
Aristotle says Agathon said.
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.
Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World War II.
Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.
He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels—three Russian ells—and buried him.
Rubén Darío died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.
I used to say to them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly in myself.
Said Joan.
He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have drowned himself if he had not been prevented by force.
Says a chronicle from the monastery where Hugo van der Goes was a lay brother.
He was known to drink, which made things worse.
Says the same.
This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.
Wanhope.
John Reed died of typhus.
Louise Bryant died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Not even to a philosopher could old age be easy in the depths of poverty, Cicero said.
Nor could a fool find it anything but burdensome even amid ample wealth.
Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing Vissi d’arte while lying on the floor.
Only because she had been elbowed off a couch by accident.
It was from God, Puccini decided.
Though with Jeritza also flaunting far too much obvious posterior, put in Geraldine Farrar.
Venus Callipyge.
Louise O’Murphy.
Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Wright died of a heart attack.
The question of Mikhail Sholokhov’s authorship of The Quiet Don.
The question of Dmitri Shostakovich’s authorship of his Memoirs.
St. Teresa of Lisieux knew The Imitation of Christ by heart.
John Masefield died of gangrene at eighty-eight when he refused to have an injured leg amputated.
Schopenhauer played the flute.
He has no insight into character. And no dramatic talent. His dialogue hardens to wood and stone.
Said Emerson about its author after reading Oliver Twist.
Camille Saint-Saëns talked with a lisp.
Mahler, discovering that Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius.
And spending an entire day discussing it with Freud.
Is Macbeth impotent?
Hans Memling. That very model of a major minor master, as Erwin Panofsky had it.
The legend that as an impoverished, wounded soldier, Memling had begun to paint in gratitude to monks who sheltered him.
Edwin Arlington Robinson died of pancreatic cancer.
Warren’s Blacking.
30, Strand.
Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis.
Ambrose Bierce fought at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga. And was wounded at Kenesaw Mountain.
The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters.
Leonidas and the Three Hundred, who would perish at Thermopylae.
Only men who had already fathered sons to leave behind had been permitted to join the command.
Said of George Washington, at the height of the war with the British:
He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-decamp.
Nabokov appears to have died of an infection caught in a hospital where he was being treated for the flu.
Paul Bowles died of a heart attack.
Jane Bowles died after a stroke.
Friday is on their island with Robinson Crusoe for thirteen out of Crusoe’s twenty-eight years.
Why does Defoe not let him ever learn to speak more than pidgin English?
Why does Stephen Crane never actually state that the battle in The Red Badge of Courage is Chancellorsville?
La Scala was severely bombed in World War II.
The Vienna Staatsoper was severely bombed in World War II.
There are so few people who know how to make art. —Julian Schnabel.
One less than he thinks. —Robert Hughes.
In Coriolanus, Shakespeare allows someone to mention Cato.
Three centuries ahead of time.
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Pericles died of plague.
Stefan Lochner purchased a house in Cologne in 1442.
Konrad Witz purchased a house in Basel in 1443.
Martin Schongauer purchased a house in Colmar in 1477.
Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.
Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.
Walter Pater died of gout.
It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak.
Said Dante of the Comedy.
William Etty.
The Axion Esti.
All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?
Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.
Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.
Laborare est Orare. Work is Worship.
Said the old monks.
Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.
Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.
Behold, this dreamer cometh.
Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.
John Dos Passos died of congestive heart failure.
Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.
A Farewell to Arms:
1590, George Peele’s version dating from.
Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.
Simone Weil’s final hospitalization was ostensibly for tuberculosis and exhaustion. Nevertheless a coroner’s report labeled her death suicide by starvation.
The woman was mad, de Gaulle said.
Mantegna used a corpse as the model for one of his Crucifixions.
Géricault used several while painting The Raft of the Medusa.
Veit Stoss died blind. And destitute.
The almost unparalleled contemporary popularity of Euripides.
Greek soldiers captured and held as slaves after the disastrous expedition at Syracuse were actually given their freedom if they could teach passages from his plays from memory.
Which many could.
George Eliot translated Spinoza.
Emma Lazarus translated Judah Halevi.
Willem de Kooning’s father was a beer distributor.
An incidental notation of Malcolm Lowry’s, while describing a visit to a room used by De Quincey in the Lake District:
Smoking Prohibited.
She only said, My life is dreary,
He cometh not, she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead.
Cousin Ruddy was habitually foul-mouthed.
Flannery O’Connor died of lupus.
In the century after their deaths, Ben Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often as Shakespeare’s.
Salathiel Pavy.
Why does Joyce let Leopold Bloom think Saverio Mercadante was Jewish?
April 26, 1937. A Monday.
Which was also Guernica’s market day, drawing peasants in from the nearby countryside.
No matter how frequently, always given pause at remembering there is no color whatsoever in the canvas.
A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid.
Being Charlotte Brontë, as seen by George Henry Lewes.
Robert Southey died of—quote—softening of the brain.
And what should they know of England who only England know?
Gauguin once tried to kill himself with arsenic.
But vomited.
Do you think up that material when you’re drunk?
Asked a cousin of Faulkner’s.
Dittersdorf, you’re not in tune.
Tintoretto died of what appears to have been stomach cancer.
Trollope died of a stroke.
Milledgeville, Georgia.
Tracts free as the Lord supplies the funds.
This is Not a Novel and Other Novels Page 6
