The Great Flood

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Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.

Kätchen Schönkopf.

Frederike Brion.

Lotte Buff.

Lili Schönemann.

Charlotte von Stein.

Christiane Vulpius.

Marianne von Willemer.

Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Baptistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.

Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door’s ten panels lay heaped amid muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before.

The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus.

David Markson, Reader’s Block

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Thought:

“She was breathing, not hard so much as fast, rapid, panting almost, still trying to draw on the cigarette which would have been too short to smoke even if her hand had been steady enough to hold it steady, sitting huddled in the chair in a kind of cloud of white tulle and satin and the rich dark heavy sheen of little slain animals, looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain.”

William Faulkner | “Knight’s Gambit”

Christian Molenaar