Reader's Block (19 page)

Tosca.

Stavrogin. Kirillov.

Martin Eden.

Hurstwood.

Pyramus and Thisbe.

Roithamer.

Pierre Glendinning.

Winnie Verloc.

George Wilson.

Hedvig Ekdal.

Christine Mannon. Orin Mannon.

Willy Loman.

Senta.

Peter Kien.

Maggie Johnson.

Peter Grimes.

Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter.

Svidrigailov.

James O. Incandenza.

Konstantin Treplev.

Bartleby.

Septimus Smith.

Deirdre.

Seymour Glass.

Ophelia.

Samson.

Eustacia Vye.

Phaedra.

Alcestis.

Launcelot.

Shakespeare’s daughters. His last surviving grandchild, Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth, would live until 1670.

But leaving no further descendants.

A daughter of Dante’s, called Antonia, went into a nunnery at his death.

And adopted the name Sister Beatrice.

Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.

Jesus? he murmured, Jesus—of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.

Protagonist’s children?

With Reader well aware that he has categorically not thought that through either.

As with how much monumentally else?

Nine hundred and sixty Jews committed suicide at Masada, in 73
A.D.,
rather than surrender to the Roman legions that had lately sacked Jerusalem.

Two small rough orange stones.

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

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

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Virgil died at fifty. Shakespeare was fifty-two. Dante, fifty-six.

Petrarch, seventy, died at his desk. Having been reading.

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

At modest estimate, at least 40 percent of the entire population of Europe was annihilated during the four years of the Black Death.

His inevitable portage of cartons? Beside a stairway to no passage?

In accommodations at a derelict graveyard? Where nobody comes, where nobody calls?

Now are fields of corn where Troy once was.

Dead?

She?

I would give you some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.

Vanishing point.

Toward what final grievous contemplation amid the disarray?

The sun will run out of hydrogen and commence to die in approximately one billion, one hundred million years.

In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the beach but to saunter out among the sandpipers and the gulls one afternoon, and stand for a time abstractedly in late autumn solitude, and then walk unremarkably into the sea?

In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the cemetery but to pause at his accustomed window one afternoon, and gaze for a time abstractedly at the ranks of still white stone beyond, and then turn unremarkably to the gas?

And Reader? And Reader?

In the end one experiences only one’s self.

Said Nietzsche.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Markson is the author of
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
(1988),
Springer’s Progress
(1977),
Going Down
(1970), and
The Ballad of Dingus Magee
(1966). He is also the author of a critical study of Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano.
Except for periods in Mexico and Europe, Markson has spent most of his adult life in New York City.