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
Image: Gerhard Richter, Firenze (30/99), 2000
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