Free Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Steven Moore

also.
    Though I naturally possess more practiced equipment for making such a determination, should that become necessary.
    In either event, what now occurs to me is that the painter was doubtless not a guest in this house either, but more likely was somebody who lived nearby. Which would more readily explain why there are three paintings by her in a house in which there are an inordinate number of books but not one of those books is about art.
    Being so closely familiar with the painter's subject matter, the people who did live in this house would have presumably been delighted to display such paintings.
    No question of aesthetic understanding would have had to enter into the arrangement at all.
    For that matter perhaps all of the houses along this beach, or many of them, contain other examples of the same painter's work.
    Perhaps even the very house which I burned to the ground contained such examples, even though it would obviously not contain them any longer, no longer being a house.
    Well, it is still a house.
    Even if there is not remarkably much left of it, I am still prone to think of it as a house when I pass it in taking my walks.
    There is the house that I burned to the ground, I might think. Or, soon I will be coming to the house that I burned to the ground.
    None of the three paintings in this house is signed, incidentally.
    Actually, I do not remember looking, but I am positive that looking is something I would have done.
    Even in museums, it is something I often do.
    I have even done it with paintings that I have been familiar with for years.
    I hardly do it because I believe that there might be any error in the attribution of a painting.
    In fact I have no idea why I do it.
    Frequently, Modigliani would sign the work of other painters. This was so they would be able to sell paintings that they otherwise might not have sold.
    Doubtless I should not have said frequently. Doubtless Modigliani did this only a handful of times.
    Still, it was kind of Modigliani, since a certain number of his friends were not eating very well.
    In fact Modigliani himself often did not eat well, although basically this would have been because he was drinking, instead.
    Once, in the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, I signed a mirror.
    I did that in one of the women's rooms, with a lipstick.
    What I was signing was an image of myself, naturally.
    Should anybody else have looked, where my signature would have been was under the other person's image, however.
    Doubtless I would not have signed it, had there been anybody else to look.
    Though in fact the name I put down was Giotto.
    There is only one mirror in this house, incidentally.
    What that mirror reflects is also an image of myself, of course.
    Though in fact what it has also reflected now and again is an image of my mother.
    What will happen is that I will glance into the mirror and for an instant I will see my mother looking back at me.
    Naturally I will see myself during that same instant, as well.
    In other words all that I am really seeing is my mother's image in my own.
    I am assuming that such an illusion is quite ordinary, and comes with age.
    Which is to say that it is not even an illusion, heredity being heredity.
    Still, it is the sort of thing that can give one pause.
    Even if it has also entered my mind to realize that I may be almost as old, by now, as my mother was then.
    My mother was only fifty-eight.
    Though she was exactly fifty, when I painted her portrait.
    Well, it was that birthday for which I painted it.
    Though I rarely did portraits.
    There were times when I regretted that I had never done a portrait of Simon, however.
    Other times I did not believe I would have wished to possess such a reminder.
    And perhaps it was their anniversary that I painted my mother and father's portraits for.
    In fact it was their thirtieth anniversary.
    I painted both of the portraits from slides, meaning the gift to be a surprise.
    What this made it necessary to do was to hang