Free Reader's Block by David Markson

Virgil.
    And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.

    Raphael’s birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.

    I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.

    Early in the Iliad, on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.
    After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.

    Bartlebooth.

    Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.

    Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

    Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.

    Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?
    Said Freud after his break with Jung.

    The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

    Beatrice Silverman.
    Adele Morales.
    Lady Jean Campbell.
    Beverly Bentley.
    Carol Stevens.
    Norris Church.

    Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.

    Leave the bum be. He’s just drunk.

    October 12, 1492. At 2 A.M., the lookout on the Pinta.
    Named Rodrigo de Triana.

    No light; but rather darkness visible.

    Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera.

    Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.

    Elizabeth Shaw Melville:
    Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

    Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.

    Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.

    Semper incumbebat libris. Spoken of Abelard.

    Not realizing that one’s future is already one’s present even as that too is dissolving into past.

    This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Two years after the book’s appearance Borowski committed suicide.
    Via gas.

    Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.

    Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.

    How often does the woman come to the grave?
    What sort of regularity is there in the visits?

    Does she sometimes fail to come?

    Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.

    The 1941 Concise Cambridge History of English Literature said that no one would ever read Ulysses even if copies were given away.

    Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?
    Hers?

    Gitanjalu

    Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.

    Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.
    Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.

    Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.

    Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.

    Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.

    Benjamin Jowett said he read Pickwick Papers at least twice every year.

    Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.

    Fatwa.

    Myles na Gopaleen.

    The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.

    Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.

    Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.

    Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.
    Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.
    No greater man ever walked the earth than he.
    Said Michelangelo of Dante.

    Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?

    How recent will he make its dates?

    Has he even yet determined the age of the woman herself?

    Or whether Protagonist does in fact catch sight of her elsewhere?

    Counterfactual conditionals.

    Beckett’s Murphy was rejected by forty-two