The Last Novel

Says Dryden’s Plutarch, re Caesar.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

Wittgenstein once suggested.

Merde pour la poésie.

Decided Rimbaud.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Being William Dunbar — The fear of death distresses me.

And which Novelist is quite certain he has quoted before in his life.

Memento mori.

Any man if he is all alone becomes more aware of being lonely as he ages.

Said Eliot.

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.

Johnson is somewhere reminded.

The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play.

Perceives Pascal.

Lorenzo da Ponte’s memoirs — in which Mozart is practically never mentioned.

I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will.

Said Goya — nearing eighty.

With an ink too thick, with foul pens, with bad sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp, I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it!

Appended Telema

Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.

What happens in the end?

Oh, in the end she dies.

Twenty-five years after his death, Poe’s remains were disinterred from what had been little better than a pauper’s grave and reburied more formally.

Walt Whitman, who made the journey from Camden to Baltimore in spite of being disabled from a recent stroke, was the only literary figure to appear at the ceremonies.

O that it were possible

We might but hold some two days’ conference

With the dead.

— Laments Webster’s Duchess.

Celan’s recollection that his mother had never had white hair.

Because of having been murdered in a concentration camp while still too young.

Céza

Degas, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck:

Als ick kan — The best I can do.

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

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Saint Gildas the Wise, of Wales, who asked that at his death he be placed in a small boat and set adrift at sea.

Sophocles, re a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:

He said he could not help it; he would happily rather not be ninety years old.

It is later than you know.

Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock — after having broken off its hands.

There is always more time than you anticipate.

Said Malcolm Lowry. For whom there wasn’t.

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

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

I too have written some good books.

Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.

Having died they are not dead.

Wrote Simonides of the Spartans slain at Plataea.

Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye:

I always made an awkward bow.

Tiny drops of water will hollow out a rock.

Lucretius wrote.

Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language — is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?

Als ick kan?

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

Said H. G. Wells.

The world began without man, and it will end without him.

Said Lévi-Strauss.

Swiftly the years, beyond recall.

Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.

— Reads the Arthur Waley translation of a Chinese fragment.

One man is born; another dies.

Being Euripides.

After death, nothing is.

Being Seneca.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Said Santayana.

When Grandpa dies and his ashes are dropped into the ocean, may I have just a little bit of them? To put into something nice, so I can keep Grandpa with me for all time?

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

Quoth Horace. We are but dust and a shadow.

Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.

Sophocles calls it.

Unregarded age in corners thrown.

Shakespeare echoes.

The worn copy of Do

I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be sorry that I bescribbled your book.

I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

Bhartrihari, fully fourteen hundred years ago, bemoaning the poverty of poets — in Sanskrit.

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Be patient now, my soul, thou hast endured worse than this.

Odysseus once says.

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die?

Asks someone in Aristophanes.

Access to Roof for Emergency Only.

Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Als ick kan.