The Last Novel

Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth — were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness — question mark.

A rejection of all that civilization has done.

Said the London Times of a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 — which included Céza

Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

While also referring to Miss God.

One never steps twice into the same Auden.

Randall Jarrell said.

Seneca’s Thyestes, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.

And is described as belching contentedly.

Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

Wondering how on earth one remembers — that when St.

John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent — was of pears simmered with ci

A good man — but he did not know how to paint.

Said El Greco of Michelangelo.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

Oh, to be seventy again!

I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head — it harmonises the soul.

Said Laurence Sterne.

The pain of rereading Twelfth Night after far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Old age is not for sissies.

Said Bette Davis.

Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.

Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.

Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

At my age, one is either well or dead.

Leukemia, Ernestine Schuma

He was greater than we thought.

Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.

Apollinaire, who was severely wounded in World War I.

And then died of influenza two days before the Armistice.

December 8, 1918, Cpl. David Markson died on.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Declares a line in Rasselas.

The Rokeby Venus. Which was purchased in Yorkshire in the early 1800s for five hundred pounds.

And sold to the National Gallery in 1906 for ninety times that amount.

Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson died in.

The Marquesas, Gauguin.

Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky — all buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

Diogenes, asking to be buried face downward —

Because the world will soon enough be turned upside down.

Every man is condemned to death — but with an indefinite reprieve.

Hugo said.

Those who know do not speak.

Those who speak do not know.

Forty-two, Kierkegaard died at.

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Said Paul Celan.

It would have been our pleasure to be bombed.

Said a survivor of Auschwitz.

August 8, 1596, Hamnet Shakespeare died on.

July 11, 1649, Susa

February 7, 1662, Judith Shakespeare Qui

Virgil’s ceaseless revisions of the Aeneid.

Writing only a few lines at a time and then licking them into shape as the she-bear does its cubs, Suetonius says he said.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

Said Benjamin Jowett.

To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe — said whoever.

Though that insignificant dot is also the astronomer — said Einstein.

Please don’t get up, I’m only passing through.

No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?

Thy labours shall outlive thee.

Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.

Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone — and in calamitous want.

Wondering when the last day may have passed — anywhere in the world — during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.

Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.

Commented Ionesco.

Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.

Late February or early March, 1945.

A

What see’st thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

His powers of mind have almost entirely left him; his late paintings are miserable; it is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties.

Said Samuel Morse after a visit with an elderly John Singleton Copley.

You don’t always make an out. Sometimes the pitcher gets you out.

Said Carl Yastrzemski.

In the long run we are all dead.

Noted Keynes.

When I went to America, my very first inquiry was concerning Melville. There was some slight evidence that he was alive, and I heard from Mr. E. C. Stedman, who seemed much astonished at my interest in the subject, that Melville was dwelling somewhere in New York.

Charidas, what is it like down there?

All darkness.

And resurrection?

All a lie.

— Quoth Callimachus.

Minor authors — who lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.

Roger Ascham takes notice of.

Those rare intellects who, not only without reward, but in miserable poverty, brought forth their works.

Vasari likewise commemorates.

One must go on working. And one must have patience.

Rodin told Rilke.

My time will come.

Said Gregor Mendel, ignored throughout his life.

On van Gogh’s bier at Auvers-sur-Oise — clusters of golden sunflowers.

Brought by Dr. Gachet.

The report that Osip Mandelstam spent the last hours before his death in Siberia reading Petrarch — by firelight.

O lente lente currite noctis equi.

Verdi’s funeral — which according to his own wishes was conducted without music.

Verdi’s.

Though in fact he had asked that the score of his Te Deum, one of the Four Sacred Pieces, be placed in his coffin.

Regensburg, Joha

Where there, long unknown.

My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.

Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.

Kynge Arthur is nat dede but shall come agayne.

I’m cold, Snowden said. I’m cold.

For sundry doctrinal reasons, the Archbishop of Paris refused to sanction a Catholic burial for Colette.

Conversely, France itself granted her a state funeral — making her the first woman ever so honored.

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

I have often thought of death, but now it is never out of mind.

Said Swift, in his late sixties — a decade before it actually occurred.

You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within.

Wrote Michelangelo at eighty-one — himself with eight years remaining.

The long littleness of life.

Frances Cornford speaks of.

As he reclined at table, there arose a question what sort of death was best. At which he immediately, before anyone could speak, said, A sudden one.