“Caesar, asked to name the best death: A sudden one.”
“Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one’s soul alive — that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world. Wrote George Gissing.”
“A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us. Said Pascal.”
“More than 60 percent of the people in the United States have not read a book from beginning to end since adolescence. If then.”
“Langston Hughes’ request that a particular Duke Ellington composition be played at his funeral: Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.”
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Said Isak Dinesen.”
“Thinking with someone else’s brain. Schopenhauer called reading.”
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been. Said Wayne Gretzky.”
“For years, Vachel Lindsay sold his poetry on street corners. The first time he did so, in New York in 1905, he took in thirteen cents. And was overjoyed.”
Whether or not I ever outgrow these feelings, I expect to return to Markson in years to come, if only to consider the question he ended his work with:
“Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die? Asks someone in Aristophanes.”
Even though that’s not the real ending. Even though the real, final ending is this: “The old man who will not laugh is a fool. Als ick kan.”
¤
