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The paths inside are of gravel, or were, long since thi
Is there a need to explain the house’s availability?
Obviously a former gatekeeper’s or superintendent’s.
William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite.
A neighbor once came upon William Blake and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost aloud in their garden. Sitting naked.
Robert Moses Grove.
Manet was so vituperatively condemned by critics that for a time he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to pose for him.
Before Ceza
Nothing now, but my books.
Haller’s books? Selkirk’s?
The Persians deployed so many bowmen at Thermopylae that it was said their arrows would blot out the sun.
To which a Spartan commander: All the better, then we will be fighting in the shade.
In his mid-thirties, T. S. Eliot was known to wear pale green face powder. One of the Sitwells said it was to make him look as if he were suffering.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an American prisoner of war in Italy at the end of World War II.
Should Protagonist possibly have written books of his own once? U
Once, he wrote a few books. That was long ago.
Nobody comes. Nobody calls.
Rossini wore a wig. In chilly weather he sometimes wore two.
In fact only two Spartans survived Thermopylae. One was killed in battle elsewhere. The other hanged himself in disgrace.
Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada.
And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance.
Je crois entendre encore.
Early on, Protagonist will naturally become familiar with most of the gravestones.
Both of Paul Celan’s parents went to their deaths in German concentration camps.
Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont.
After Cesare Pavese committed suicide, several young women none of his friends had ever seen before appeared at his funeral weeping, in the hope of being taken for former mistresses.
They make a desert and they call it peace.
The Knight of Pentacles, Reversed: A brave Man, but out of Employment, Idle, Negligent.
Boris Pasternak so admired Rilke that he carried two letters from him in his wallet for decades.
Nothing now, but Protagonist’s books.
Those, and the graves of strangers.
Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected The Way of All Flesh.
Working as a publisher’s reader, Andre Gide rejected Swa
Saint Hildegard of Bingen.
Or would Reader rather see Protagonist live somewhere else entirely?
An isolated house at a beach, for instance?
Although perhaps without the even more absolute solitude that might establish?
At least with others on a floor above? A woman? Women?
Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.
Preferably separate entrances. The house on a dune, possibly, with Protagonist and the others coming and going along opposite sides of the slope.
And with Protagonist’s entrance in the rear, a sort of basement? Possibly what had once been an indoor garage?
Ergo almost never seeing these women, merely being aware of their proximity. Or hearing them, on occasion.
Raskolnikov. Bloom. Mr. Kurtz.
Rochester died in 1680. A full collection of his verse was not published until 1926.
And even then was not allowed into the United States.
Flaubert’s lamp burned with such regularity late at night in his workroom at Croisset that pilots on the Seine were able to take their bearings from it.
Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points?
In this house the same initial impermanence, the same cartons.
At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ.
Ship me somewheres east of Suez.
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of little old ladies.
A person on business from Porlock.
Aldonza Lorenzo.
Raskolnikov wrote some books once.
Very little happened in co
Jack London committed suicide.
Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo.
Protagonist reading. Hearing them, up above.
Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink.
A listing still exists of the wi
Kant was an anti-Semite.
That garage area, at the rear, looks out onto little more than scrub and brush. There is a path Raskolnikov/Bloom follows through the dunes, but heading away diagonally, so that he has almost no view of the upper story then either.
Anaximander was sixty-four years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad.
Being how Diogenes Laertius once situates him.
Would some sort of deck on the upper story face the ocean? How distantly perceived from the beach when Protagonist strolls there?
Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero.
Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.
How many years have passed since the last burial in the cemetery? Do mourners still appear?
Heraclitus did not say that one ca
Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however.
And that souls smell in Hades.
A. E. Housman never in his life lived in Shropshire.
Ralph Roister-Doister.