Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday. (1)

To me, or him? (2)

Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday. (3)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before. (4)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Picasso made Gertrude Stein sit more than eighty times for her portrait. 
And then painted out the head and redid it three months later without having seen her again. (5)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMGallery

Pablo Casals began each day for more than seventy years by playing Bach. (6)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

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I have come to this place because I had no life back there at all. (7)

I have, Reader has? (8)

Reader has come to this place because he had no life back there at all. (9)
Miffed, I was to be Reader.

Someone nodded hello to him on the street yesterday. (10)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Anna Akhmatova had an affair with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Late in life, not having left Russia again in a third of a century, she would be astonished to learn how famous he had become. (11)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map
Rule: read the wiki article of any person mentioned.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen, the population of Stratford would have been little more than fifteen hundred. Is it a safe assumption that he knew the woman named Katherine Hamlet who fell into the Avon that summer and drowned? (12)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map #Speculation

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house. (13)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #OnlyTheLonely

Even among the most tentative first thoughts about a first draft, why is Reader thinking of his central character as Reader? (14)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Gray’s Elegy is 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it. (15)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #Numbers

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt. (16)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Fires #GreatsOnGreats

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down? (17)

Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however. (18)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall. (19)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Drunk

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me? (20)
#Reader/Protagonist

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an anti-Semite. (21)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry 
The first of many.

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.
Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot. (22)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend
How’s our Mandarin?

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His life evidently static. Alone, seemingly without occupation or achievement, his means meager.
Emptiness. (23)
#Reader/Protagonist

Anthony Trollope said he had read Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie at least three dozen times. (24)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #GreatsOnGreats
The Vespertilius Horribilis Americanus

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Protagonist? (25)

Perhaps someone from a shop Protagonist had stopped in at, a clerk? Or merely someone in a friendly mood in passing? (26)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Severn, lift me up, I am dying. (27)
Don’t breathe on me, it comes like ice. (28)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend 
Both 27 and 28 are deathbed utterances by John Keats as recorded by friend and hospice nurse Joseph Severn. 

The world is my idea. (29)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations
The opening proposition to Arthur Schopenauer’s The World as Will and Idea.

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also the first person he ever saw who could read without moving his lips. (30)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Always confusing: Aquinas and Augustine.

Saxo Grammaticus (31)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

 It is not impossible that the young actress Molière married when he was forty, and with whose family he had been closely connected in the theater for years, was his own illegitimate daughter. (32)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

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Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (33)
#Reader/Protagonist
This is not the Collector’s first collection.

At the age of seven, Giambattista Vico fell from a ladder and fractured his skull so severely that his parents were told to anticipate feeblemindedness. (34)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Where, this isolation? (35)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Giorgione and Titian were pupils of Giovanni Bellini’s in Venice together. Giorgione was dead in his early thirties, in 1510. Titian was still painting sixty-six years later. (36)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map

What has happened? It is life that has happened; and I am old. (37)

Said Louis Aragon. (38)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox. 
Said Xenophanes. (39)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

26 Piazza di Spagna (40)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons  #DM Map

More Keats.

Laurence Sterne’s corpse was sold to a medical school by grave robbers. It had been almost completely dissected before someone chanced to recognize it. (41)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

How much of Reader’s own circumstances or past would he in fact give to Protagonist in such a novel? (42)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Tolle lege, tolle lege. (43) 
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations

Wherever conquest led him, Alexander the Great made it a point to have botanical specimens sent back to Aristotle, who had been his tutor. A copy of the Iliad that he carried in a jeweled chest contained emendations in Aristotle’s handwriting. (44)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 
If still extant, one can’t even imagine how much this copy of the Iliad would be worth. 

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young. (45)
 #DMquotations #DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

Leonardo’s notebooks indicate that he knew the sun did not move before Copernicus did. (46)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Nobody came. Nobody called. (47) 
#Reader/Protagonist

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Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time. (48)

Freud. (49)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Joseph Beuys was a Stuka pilot in World War II. (50)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Monet, visiting London:
This brown thing? This is your Turner? (51)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats #DM Map

René Descartes was born in a hayfield. (52)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Ultimately, Emily Dickenson would even hide from visitors at her house itself. (53)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #PoorMadDirtyDrunkAlone 

Reader and this notion of his. (54)

Reader and his mind full of clutter. (55)

What is a novel in any case? (56)

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography after all? (57)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Bohemia. A desert country near the sea. (58)
#DM Map #DMquotations #DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 
Rule: Read any work mentioned by name, quotation, or character.

In 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Perruggia who had been working at the Louvre managed to remove the Mona Lisa from its frame and walk out with it under his overalls. 
And to go unsuspected until he tried to sell it two years later. (59)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #DMGallery #DMTimeline 

Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping. (60)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Always a bit confused on the mechanics. Is it the heat or gas of the stove that is lethal? The heat seems improbable. If it is the gas, why aren’t the children dead?

Leibniz: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? (61)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Speculation

When Daumier was sixty, destitute and almost blind, Corot bought the house Daumier was renting and gave it to him. (62)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Der Untergang des Abendlandes. (63)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps? (64)

A sense somehow of total retreat? Abandonment? (65)
#Reader/Protagonist

Albert Camus’ father was killed in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was only months old. His mother was an illiterate charwoman. (66)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Once, at dinner, with great delicacy Brahms told Tchaikovsky that he did not approve of his work.
With equal delicacy Tchaikovsky told Brahms that he did not approve of his. (67)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

After Byron and Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned Shelly’s body on the beach at Viareggio, they got drunk. Boisterously, shouting and laughing and even singing.
Then again, they had been dealing with remains already five weeks bloated and decomposed. Bryon had at least once turned sick. (68)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain? (69)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf

In Königsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years. (70)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like? (71)

An assemblage? (72)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Knut Hamsun was once a horse-car conductor in Chicago. (73)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyricon could have been lost forever, for instance. (74)
#DMBookshelf

Mallarmé learned English specifically to read Poe (75)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Walter the Penniless. Peter the Hermit. (76)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

During the four years that Dostoievsky spent at hard labor in Siberia for political conspiracy, the only book he was allowed was the New Testament. Though once in a prison hospital he found Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. (77)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf 

Deus Vult (78)
#DMquotations

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was. (79)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #parents
🎵 He loooooved his mother

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.
Said Henry James. (80)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

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George Bernard Shaw was an anti-Semite. (81)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry

Protagonist first seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartoons heaped and piled
Innumerable books, Reader presumably means? (82)
#Reader/Protagonist

The name Kierkegaard translates from the Danish as church-yard. (83)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. (84)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky never finished grade school. Sean O’Casey and Alberto Moravia did not either. 
O’Casey, at forty-three, was working with a pick and shovel when his first play was produced. (85)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Where precisely would Protagonist live, if near a derelict cemetery? Possibly some sort of structure just within the grounds themselves?
That building abandoned also? Protagonist possibly stealing electricity through wires connected to the base of a streetlamp outside?
Reader sees a red brick building, in fact. Fairly small and falling into ruin, but of two stories. (86)
#Reader/Protagonist

None of John Milton’s daughters was given an education, though two of the three were taught to read to him in his blindness. 
In languages of which they did not understand one word. (87)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

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Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples. (88)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

As a boy, Tennyson could recite all 103 of Horace’s odes from memory.
Montaigne claimed he knew those and the rest of Horace as well. (89)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats #Numbers

No life back there at all.
What life here, now? (90)
#Reader/Protagonist #Markson Mysteries 

John Donne posed for a painting in his own shroud. And kept it beside his bed during a long final illness. (91)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Why is Reader always mildly incredulous at remembering that the decimal system arose from counting on one’s finger? (92)
#Reader/Protagonist #Speculation

Several ancient oaks, also within the grounds, partly obscure the house. At night, the single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window is extremely faint. 
There are wire mesh fences, in jagged disrepair.  (93)
#Reader/Protagonist

Käthe Kollwitz lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II. (94)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep. (95)
#DMquotations #DMBookshelf

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According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens. (96)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Could one, actually, rewire the connections of a streetlamp in that manner? (97)
#Reader/Protagonist

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup. (98)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

On a shelf beside Reader’s desk: a human skull, a reproduction of Giotto’s portrait of Dante, two small rough orange stones. (99)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Reader/Protagonist 

Hrotsvitha van Gandersheim. (100)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old grandaughter to a park and then forgot her there. (101)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Collector is from a family of academics. Oddly, this is relatable.

Hospitals, Protagonist will have been in. (102)
#Reader/Protagonist

And grows older. (103)
#Reader/Protagonist

Dulcinea del Toboso. (104)
#DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

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Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on.
In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits. (105)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

Should Reader determine a name for Protagonist at this juncture after all?
#Reader/Protagonist

Ishmael. Meursault. Harry Haller. (106)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

Should he give him children, if he is still being in part autobiographical? (107)
#Reader/Protagonist

A son and a daughter, then? (108)
#Reader/Protagonist

Zeno hanged himself after breaking a toe. At ninety. (109)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Alexander Selkirk. (110)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

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Once, not knowing which of several houses was Bizet’s, Saint-Saëns simply stood in the road singing an aria from Les Pêcheurs de Perles. (111) 
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Surely, a clerk from the liquor store where Protagonist had already stopped in two or three times for cheap wine, recognizing him? (112)
#Reader/Protagonist

At twenty, Joseph Conrad tried to commit suicide over gambling losses. 
In later life managing to let people believe the bullet wound had come from a duel. (113)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #PoorMadDirtyDrunkAlone

The cemetery is in the oldest section of the town, and the few dwellings on the opposite side of the street, modest and rundown themselves, seem to house very few residents. A point being that no one questions Protagonist’s presence. 
Nor is the fence mesh at that, rather it is a more traditional cemetery construction of tall iron spikes. The gate at the entrance is partly unhinged and askew. 
The paths inside are of gravel, or were, long since thinned and scattered. (114)
#Reader/Protagonist

Is there a need to explain the house’s availability? (115)
#Reader/Protagonist

Obviously a former gatekeeper’s or superintendent’s. (116)
#Reader/Protagonist

William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite. (117)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry

A neighbor once came upon William Blake and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost aloud in their garden. Sitting naked. (118)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf
Milton in the buff.

Robert Moses Grove. (119)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Manet was so vituperatively condemned by critics that for a time he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to pose for him. 
Before Cézanne had gained any recognition he once burst into tears when someone sincerely admired his work. (120)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Nothing now, but my books. (121)
#Reader/Protagonist 

Haller’s books? Selkirk’s? (122)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

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. (123)
#DMquotations #DM Map

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. (124)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats
Reader’s Block 193 pages, This Is Not A Novel 190 pages 

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an American prisoner of war in Italy at the end of World War II. (125)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Should Protagonist possibly have written books of his own once? Unnamed and undescribed, mentioned almost incidentally? 
Once, he wrote a few books. That was long ago. (126)
#Reader/Protagonist 

Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (127)
#Reader/Protagonist
Vanishing Point 191 pages, The Last Novel 190 pages.

Rossini wore a wig. In chilly weather he sometimes wore two. (128)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

In fact only two Spartans survived Thermopylae. One was killed in battle elsewhere. The other hanged himself in disgrace. (129)
#DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend
800 pages of whatnot.

Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada. 
And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance. (130)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Je crois entendre encore. (131)
#DMquotations 

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Early on, Protagonist will naturally become familiar with most of the gravestones. (132)
#Reader/Protagonist

Both of Paul Celan’s parents went to their deaths in German concentration camps. (133)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend #Bigotry

Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont. (134)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

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. (135)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

They make a desert and they call it peace. (136)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations
Tacitus conceived of Spain being due west of Britain.

The Knight of Pentacles, Reversed: A brave Man, but out of Employment, Idle, Negligent. (137) 

Boris Pasternak so admired Rilke that he carried two letters from him in his wallet for decades. (138)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Numbers #GreatsOnGreats

Nothing now, but Protagonist’s books.
Those, and the graves of strangers. (139)
#Reader/Protagonist

Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected The Way of All Flesh. 
Working as a publisher’s reader, André Gide rejected Swann’s Way. (140)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #GreatsOnGreats

Saint Hildegard of Bingen. (141)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map
Collector is wondering if this project is even possible?

Or would Reader rather see Protagonist live somewhere else entirely? 
An isolated house at a beach, for instance? (142)
#Reader/Protagonist

Although perhaps without the even more absolute solitude that might establish? 
At least with others on a floor above? A woman? Women? (143)
#Reader/Protagonist

Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville. (144)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations #DM Map

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Preferably separate entrances. The house on a dune, possibly, with Protagonist and the others coming and going along opposite sides of the slope. (145)
#Reader/Protagonist

And with Protagonist’s entrance in the rear, a sort of basement? Possibly what had once been an indoor garage? (146)
#Reader/Protagonist

Ergo almost never seeing these women, merely being aware of their proximity. Or hearing them, on occasion. (147)
#Reader/Protagonist

Raskolnikov. Bloom. Mr. Kurtz. (148)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf
Given Reader’s indecision about so many aspects of this narrative. Can we also say Hamlet?

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. (149)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMTimeline #DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

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. (150)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points? (151)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

In this house the same initial impermanence, the same cartons. (152)
#Reader/Protagonist

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At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ. (153)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Numbers #GreatsOnGreats

Ship me somewheres east of Suez. (154)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations #DM Map

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. (155)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations 

A person on business from Porlock. (156)
#DM Map
I think each of my children are somehow from Porlock.

Aldonza Lorenzo. (157)
#DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

Raskolnikov wrote some books once. (158)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

Very little happened in connection with any of them. In any
event that was long ago. (159)
#Reader/Protagonist

Jack London committed suicide. (160)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo. (161)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Protagonist reading. Hearing them, up above. (162)
#Reader/Protagonist
My wife too.

Mussorgsky died raving mad from drink. (163)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons#ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

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A listing still exists of the winning runners in the Olympic Games from 776 B.C. through the next 993 years. Events in Greek history were dated by the Olympiad in which they occurred. (164)
#DMTimeline #Numbers

Kant was an anti-Semite. (165)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry

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. (166)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

Anaximander was sixty-four years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad. 
Being how Diogenes Laërtius once situates him. (167)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Numbers
What’s Xanadu without Porlock, however?

Would some sort of deck on the upper story face the ocean? How distantly perceived from the beach when Protagonist strolls there? (168)
#Reader/Protagonist

Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero. (169)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt. (170)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations #DM Map

How many years have passed since the last burial in the cemetery? Do mourners still appear? (171)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did. (172)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

Heraclitus did say that praying to statues of the gods was like talking to a house instead of to its owner, however. (173)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

And that souls smell in Hades. (174)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

A. E. Housman never in his life lived in Shropshire. (175)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Ralph Roister-Doister. (176)
#DMBookshelf
Of love I make my mone.

It took eight years to sell the first printing of six hundred copies of The Interpretation of Dreams. (177)
#DMBookshelf #Numbers

Our sister, death. (178)
#DMBookshelf

Perhaps one solitary mourner appearing, regularly, at one grave. Here again, a woman. Young. In fact too young to have a connection with anyone buried here that Protagonist can fathom. 
Or are some few of the graves more recent? (179)
#Reader/Protagonist

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Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck. (180)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

When Ovid was banished from Rome, it was to Tomi, on the Black Sea.
Would Reader have otherwise ever heard of a city in Romania now called Constanta? (181)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #Speculation

Anne Bradstreet’s first home in Massachusetts, a decade after the Mayflower, was at what later would become Harvard Square. (182)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Aesop was a slave. Terence was a slave. Epictetus was a slave. (183)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Protagonist watching the woman who appears?
After a time, finding himself waiting for her almost unwittingly? (184)
#Reader/Protagonist

Helen Frankenthaler Motherwell, her name legally once was. (185)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Frédéric Chopin was an anti-Semite. (186)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry

Madame, 
If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together. (187)
#DMquotations

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Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum. (188)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #PoorMadDirtyDrunkAlone #Numbers

Someone will call. Surely someone will call. (189)
#Reader/Protagonist

Aristotle’s may have been the first purely private library. (190)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

At forty-six, after an illness, Goya suddenly turned stone deaf. (191)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons 

How long can Reader deal with Protagonist’s isolation without explaining his background? (192)
#Reader/Protagonist

How conceivable is it for the emptiness to simply exist? (193)
#Markson Mysteries

L’Être et le Néant. (194)
#DMBookshelf

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Blaise Cendrars lost an arm in World War I. As did one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers, a concert pianist. (195)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Lice in the locks of literature, Tennyson called critics. (196)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations
All page numbers mentioned are from 5th edition of Reader’s Block.

Or will the question persist? Why does Protagonist have no life? (197)
#Reader/Protagonist

Having written books of his own, would he have known other writers? (198)
#Reader/Protagonist

Does he not, now? (199)
#Reader/Protagonist

After Anne Sexton turned on her car’s engine in a closed garage to commit suicide, she sat drinking vodka while waiting. (200)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Erinna of Telos, who died at nineteen. Twenty-three hundred years ago. (201)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend #Numbers

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. (202)
#DMBookshelf

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The woman at the grave. (203)

Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist about whom a full-length biography was written. (204)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down. (205)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #DMquotations 

June 22, 1633:
With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and abhor the aforesaid errors and heresies contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that henceforward I will never again say or declare, verbally or in writing, anything that might bring about a similar suspicion toward me. (206)
#DMTimeline #DMquotations

Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty. (207)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Where would Protagonist’s son and/or daughter be? How often would he see, hear from them? (208)
#Reader/Protagonist

Will he? (209)
#Reader/Protagonist

Samuel Beckett was once forced to hide for ten days under a false floor in Nathalie Sarraute’s Paris attic while working for the Resistance in World War II.  (210)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #Numbers 

Eppur si muove. (211)
#DMquotations

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Armande Béjart. (212)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times. (213)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #Numbers

An illiterate, underbred book. Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses. (214)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMBookshelf #DMquotations #GreatsOnGreats

I can’t even pronounce the filthy thing. Said Wallace Stevens of the word womb in a poem. (215)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations #Bigotry

All legends to the contrary, Empedocles did not leap into Mount Etna. Or even die in Sicily. (216)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Byron was nine when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray. (217)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
I was just a skinny lad
Never knew no good from bad
But I knew life before I left my nursery
Left alone with big fat fanny
She was such a naughty nanny
Big woman,
You made a bad boy out of me

How well insulated would the ceiling of a former garage be? Would Ishmael/Meursault/Kurtz be aware of virtually every movement on the floor above? (218)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf

Tony Trollope, he was naturally called. (219)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Madeleine Grey. The Chants d’Auvergne. (220)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Rule: Listen to any piece of music mentioned. 

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Why is it never part of Reader’s active memory that Helen of Troy was the daughter of a god and was hatched from an egg? (221)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMCastofCharacters #Speculation

Though Homer insists she was mortal. (222)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Aquinas knew almost nothing about history. (223)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Maigret. (224)
#DMCastofCharacters

Does it go without saying that this upstairs presence would accentuate Protagonist’s sense of his aloneness? (225)
#Reader/Protagonist

Does it go without saying that he deplores being alone? (226)
#Reader/Protagonist

Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. He may have been playing Russian roulette rather than definitely intending suicide.
But in either event had put on a clean shirt first. (227)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Mênin aeïde, thea. (228)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations

George Gissing’s first wife became a prostitute. His second wife went mad. (229)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

No one nodding to him on the street in passing after all? Something more categorical? (230)
#Reader/Protagonist

I am completely alone here now? (231)
#Reader/Protagonist

Helen was not the first petticoat that caused a war. Says Burton in the Anatomy. (232)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMCastofCharacters #DMBookshelf #Bigotry

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Impoverished and freezing, Gérard de Nerval hanged himself near a cheap Paris doss-house after no one responded to his late-night-knock. (234)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend
Nobody there.
Nobody answered.

Alexander Pushkin was an anti-Semite. (235)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World. (236)
#DMquotations

Hegel had an illegitimate son. At his wedding, the boy’s mother showed up with a letter promising matrimony. And had to be bought off on the spot. (237)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Protagonist is completely alone here now. (238)
#Reader/Protagonist

Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all. (239)
#Reader/Protagonist

102 Boulevard Haussman. (240)
#DM Map

Even on the coolest evenings, when she kneels at the grave, the woman is bareheaded. (241)
#Reader/Protagonist

Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he 
wrote Cicero the news. (242)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Ananda. Having been Buddha’s cousin, as well as his favorite pupil. (243)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

The Gulf of Spezia. (244)
#DM Map

Masaccio died at twenty-seven. So suddenly that poison was not unsuspected, Vasari says. (245)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

The eulogy at Puccini’s funeral was delivered by Benito Mussolini. (246)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #GreatsOnGreats

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

November 9, 1953. St. Vincent’s Hospital, Seventh Avenue and West 11th Street, New York. 
Acute alcoholic insult to the brain. (247)
#DMTimeline #DM Map #ThisIsTheEndMyFriend

Taliesin. (248)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Willem de Kooning lived as an illegal immigrant for his first thirty years in the United States. (249)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Numbers

On one of Reader’s windowsills: framed photographs of his son and daughter, a scuffed baseball, a sunbleached knotted root plucked from the Ebro. (250)
#Reader/Protagonist #DM Map

Poe was expelled from West Point for refusing to obey military orders. Later, James McNeill Whistler would fail there academically. (251)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DM Map

Why is it commonly referred to as the Arnolfini Marriage, or even the Arnolfini Betrothal, when she is seven months pregnant? (252)
#Speculation

Im Westen Nichts Neues. (253)
#DMBookshelf

Decades afterward, locked indelibly in Reader’s mind the last two pages of Good Morning, Midnight. (254)
#Reader/Protagonist #DMBookshelf #Numbers #GreatsOnGreats
The rape scene from The Fountainhead burned into mine.

Ernest Hemingway was an anti-Semite. (255)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Bigotry

Ingenious nonsense, Isaac Newton dismissed poetry as. (256)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.

Fernande Olivier. Dora Maar.
Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Olga Koklova.
Françoise Gilot.
Jacqueline Roque. (257)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons
Picasso’s principle muse/wife/mistress list. A tough gig from my cursory reading.

Rabelais: As for you, little envious Prigs, snarling, bastard, puny Critics, you’ll soon have railed your last: Go hang yourselves. (258)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #DMquotations

A one-legged woman, in a conspicuously short skirt, manipulating swiftly on crutches along a crowded street.
Why does Reader still recall having noticed her, quite some few years ago now in fact, and even somewhat distantly? (259)
#Reader/Protagonist #Numbers

On the actual night before her wedding, Edith Wharton had no idea of the facts of life. (260)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go. (261)
#DMBookshelf #DMquotations

There is no mention of Ockham’s Razor in anything Ockham ever wrote. (262)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons

Protagonist walking the beach, probably every day, at water’s edge.
Oddly, Reader for the moment viewing him particularly in harsh weather, huddled against winds.
Snow in patches. (263)
#Reader/Protagonist

Wittgenstein was cited for bravery three times during World War I.
Fighting against the Allies. (264)
#DMGuidetoIllustriousPersons #Numbers

Goat song. (265)

Check out other posts from the Markson Project here.