I first encountered David Markson’s “notecard quartet” of novels (so-called as they were written on a series of index cards) after having read his perhaps more famous Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which has variously been called one of the great English-language experimental novels of the late 20th century. I admit to having enjoyed it, though I had to trudge through to the very end. As a young and assiduous reader (I would say I am still both), I continued onto the final books Markson wrote, and found there something greater and,  in a sense, more uniquely totalizing.

Markson’s final four novels—Reader’s Block (1996), Vanishing Point (2001), This Is Not a Novel (2004), and The Last Novel (2007)—all take a similar shape. There is a mercurial protagonist in the first, and indeed by the second book, he has vanished. Instead, we as readers receive a collection of anecdotes, aphorisms, and oddities culled from a life spent reading, a life in books. We learn a great many things from Markson’s quartet. A former teacher of mine once disparaged these books by claiming that they seemed to want to make their reader feel very smart. That once one has read this collage of odds-and-ends about the lives of famous artists and writers, one will have felt that they’ve learned something valuable, though precisely what, it isn’t clear. To this criticism I say: So what? I would like to leave a book filled with a little more of life than when I entered it. When I re-read these four novels for the purposes of this work, I admit to have found it less impressive than I once did. Yet this is understandable and even has a literary precedent: Samuel Beckett, a lifelong fan of Buster Keaton, when finally able to re-watch The General so many years later as an older man, was quietly disappointed he did not enjoy it as much as he once did. Art always grows fuller in our imaginations, we can’t help it.

It’s here, then, that I’ve collected the sentences from Markson’s four novels I find most worthy of note. What one writer finds interesting in another’s work speaks as much to the former as it does to the latter—perhaps even more so, no? So let this be an autobiography, twice removed: as Markson collected his scraps and stitched them into the pages of his novels, so I take Markson and stitch him into the pages of my own writing. If Pierre Menard was able to write a version of Don Quixote that was truly his own, I have done the same, with much less effort. For the sake of autobiography, I’ve organized them in the order they appear in their respective novels, as that is the order in which I first read them. And this is about me—

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death. Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot. Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time. In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old granddaughter to a park and then forgot her there. Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on. In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits. 

In his mid-thirties, T.S. Eliot was known to wear pale green face powder. One of the Sitwells said it was to make him look as if he were suffering. Tolstoy’s wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times. Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news. Life is a long preparation for something that never happens, Yeats said. 

Aristotle presumed that women have fewer teeth than men. Soutine was in fact once beaten so badly for sketching someone’s portrait that he was able to collect damages. No one can steal my words. These are the words of Theognis. How old is Hamlet? 

Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-six years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in the Syrian desert. For most of that time his body a mass of maggot-infested sores. The maggots no more than eating what God had intended for them, he said. Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty addresses in four years. The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus. A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said. 

Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris. Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar. Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed. Give him a jugful and he will write one hundred poems. Said Tu Fu of Li Po. 

Lévi-Strauss: The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man. Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times. Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.  Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind. 

Who is speaking, and says, We were in study-hall, in the first sentence of Madame Bovary? The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole. I couldn’t read it. The human mind isn’t that complex. Said Einstein, returning Kafka to Thomas Mann. Rilke never read a daily newspaper. 

Robert Burton may have committed suicide. Legend has him having predicted the date of his death through astrology. Then making certain it was correct. Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat. And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death. Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir. Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman. Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Suffering Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning once had to be prevented from eating a cigarette. W.H. Auden was once arrested for urinating in a public park in Barcelona. Ivan Turgenev, at nineteen, during a shipboard fire: Save me! I am my mother’s only son!

Space is blue and birds fly through it. Said Werner Heisenberg. Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert. A hyena that writes poetry on tombs, Nietzsche called Dante. Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Being Samul Johnson’s précis of the poet’s life. 

Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done. Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing. Rarely, if ever, having had it come to mind: That Marcel Proust constantly wheezed. I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. Says Darwin’s Autobiography. 

If you find this work difficult, and wearisome to follow, take pity on me, for I have repeated these calculations seventy times. Wrote Johannes Kepler. Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day, Emerson said. The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho, Auden called Rilke. Thomas Hardy wrote a carefully sanitized third-person biography of himself and left it behind for his widow to pretend she was the author of. Schubert could never afford a piano.

Among Wittgenstein’s spelling, when using English: Anoied. Realy. Excelentely. Expences. Affraid. Cann’t. A. E. Housman, on the surest source of poetic inspiration: A pint, at luncheon. I have never heard of any old man forgetting where he had hidden his money, Cicero said. 

This is also even an autobiography, if Writer says so. He is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote. Said Phillip III, at the sight of a student banging himself on the head and doubling over in hysterics over a book. There is no one so foolish as to praise Don Quixote. Said Lope de Vega. The first English translation of Madame Bovary was done by a daughter of Karl Marx. Who would later take her own life much the way Emma does. Far too many notes, my dear Mozart.

During the thirty days’ grace between his conviction and the hemlock, Socrates memorized a long poem by Stesichorus. I wish to die knowing one more thing. Corot more than once added a few brushstrokes and then signed his own name to the work of other painters—who would otherwise not have been able to sell. The St. Vincent de Paul of painting, he came to be called. It is not necessary to have dandruff to be a genius, Puccini said. 

What artists do cannot be called work. Says Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires. Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping. One of St. Jerome’s letters to St. Augustine took nine years to be delivered. 

Plato talked too much, Diogenes said. Dickens’ astonishing manic walks. Of as many as twenty-five miles—and at a headlong pace. Fray Luis de Léon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition: As I was saying… 

It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said. Kierkegaard was regularly beaten up by his schoolmates. Yeats aussi. Laurence Sterne’s realization roughly a third of the way through Tristram Shandy that the book lacks a preface. Whereupon he inserts one right where he is. Paper will put up with anything that’s written on it. Said Stalin. 

The English think soap is civilization. Treitschke said. The legend that Donatello almost supernaturally refused to die until his commonplace crucifix could be replaced by one carved by Brunelleschi. Mozart was addicted to billiards. Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probable that he never saw the ocean either. Schopenhauer’s father jumped out a window. 

The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese, Kierkegaard called reading one’s reviews. Baudelaire often wore pink gloves. Was Plutarch the first writer ever to counsel kindness to animals? There seems to me too much misery in the world, said Darwin. St. Augustine’s admission that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in creating flies. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was evidently the first person in England ever to receive a ticket for speeding. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book? He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman. Reported a pupil of Chopin’s. Aristotle, asked what grows old most swiftly: Gratitude. 

James Laughlin once changed a flat tire for Gertrude Stein. Samuel Beckett once sat through a New York vs. Houston doubleheader at Shea Stadium. There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando. Fichte once badly needed to borrow money from Kant. Kant said no. 

Auden was known to show up at the opera in a stained tuxedo and bedroom slippers. Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music. Said Rossini. The one person in the world he would have liked to meet, Lenin said, was Charlie Chaplin. The kingdom of heaven, as described to Rilke by Marina Tsvetayeva after a lifetime of deprivation: Never again to sweep floors. 

You can never do too much drawing, Tintoretto said. Bertrand Russell, at seventy-six, survived an ocean plane crash in which a number of other passengers were killed. The last book Freud read before his death was La Peau de chagrin by Balzac. The last book Kafka read before his death was Verdi by Franz Werfel. 

Farewell and be kind. Say the last words of the original edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy. We ought to leave when the play grows wearisome. Said Cicero. The story of Jesus has helped us a lot. Allowed Pope Leo X. It is difficult to find those places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there. Said Strabo of the lost past. 

The legend that Diogenes committed suicide by simply holding his breath. Orchestra play like pig. Being an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them in Italian. Thomas Hardy’s anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn’t certain it existed—and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage. Keats. Wondering aloud where Shakespeare was sitting when he wrote To be or not to be. 

I can’t listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things. Said Lenin. The legend that nine months after his death, Dante appeared to one of his sons in a dream and told him where to find the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso, until then believed to be unwritten. The world goeth fast from bad to worse, said John Gower. Ca. 1375. 

I am I because my little dog knows me. Said Gertrude Stein. T.S. Eliot was afraid of cows. Superb administrative talent, Kafka’s superiors at the insurance company said he possessed. Brahms was forty-three before he completed his first symphony. A symphony is no joke—unquote. 

The still extant bill of sale for fifty-eight pairs of gloves that Balzac purchased at one time. Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce. And to depart leaving it there. Zola Neale Hurston’s jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by telling the police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her. Everything that Velazquez does may be regarded as absolutely right, said Ruskin. 

Goethe wrote Werther in four weeks. An anonymous Cynic philosopher, re the Odyssey: I do not find that Odysseus the Wise does anything but dine and chase women. Learning from the Divine Comedy that one-way traffic had been established in thirteenth-century Rome. I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it. Said Gertrude Stein. Writing in bed, Mark Twain preferred.

Fretful, timorous, and a tell-tale—Coleridge’s own description of his childhood self. The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. Goethe’s English spelling: I am luky. Stephen Crane’s judgement that War and Peace should have been one third its length: It goes on and on like Texas. We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only. Says Burton in the Anatomy. 

Schopenhauer was someone else who talked to himself—loudly, on public thoroughfares. It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier. Said Emerson. Every man is as God made him, and often a good deal worse. Says Sancho Panza. A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us. Said Pascal. 

Debussy, on the personality of Proust: A bit of the concierge. On one of his visits to the wreck of his ship early in the novel, Robinson Crusoe finds gold—but quickly realizes it is of no value to him at all. However, upon second thoughts, I took it away. Was Walter Benjamin the first point out that where every home once possessed room after room in which people had died, in today’s world virtually everyone dies somewhere else? 

Pliny the Younger’s assertion that reading the Greek and Latin orators could cure digestive problems. Saint Francis of Assisi, finding his own deathbed infested with mice—Which he decided was amusing. Baudelaire, still basically unknown, once wrote to Wagner praising his music but not including a return address: Lest you might think I wanted something from you. A good book is twice as good if it is short. Said Baltasar Gracían. 

The world as perceived by Rimbaud: Full of grocers. Ravel weighed less than one hundred pounds. The standard Italian translation of Moby Dick is by Cesare Pavese. I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly. Said Freud, rejecting drugs while enduring the cancer that slowly took his life. At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word. 

Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces. Said Proust. The winter during which Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock attended at least six performances of Don Giovanni. There is nothing perfect in this world, Peacock said. Except Mozart. I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse. Said Brendan Behan. 

Spinoza’s queer insistence that he found it almost impossible to believe he had ever been a child. Cicero’s ironic view of philosophers who preach that men should repudiate ambition—but who sign their books. It was James Laughlin who was called upon to make an official identification at the morgue after the death of Dylan Thomas. 

Decades before it became commonplace, Joyce was generally most comfortable in tennis shoes. Wittgenstein almost never wore a necktie. Exceptionally shy, Virgil was known to be. In part because of a stutter. Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to high school together. 

Literature is what gets taught, Roland Barthes said. The first pianist to perform with the side of the piano facing the audience was Liszt. Out of vanity over his profile. Taking it for granted for so long that one no longer thinks to be astonished—That Milton, blind, dictated Paradise Lost. Aristotle’s conclusion that one could tell how bad a play was by the amount of food eaten in the audience during the performance. Diogenes, asked what sort of wine he preferred: That which belongs to another. 

The red and roundy sun, John Clare called it. Thirteen pages in seven weeks. Five days on one page. Three days on eight lines. Read random notations in Flaubert’s letters re progress on Madame Bovary. Said Propertius: Among the dead there are thousands of beautiful women. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Said Isak Dinesen. Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself about. Said Marcus Aurelius. 

Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did first look into Chapman’s Homer—and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast. At least once, Flaubert informs readers that Emma Bovary’s eyes are brown. And several other times that they are black. Claude Monet’s admission, after standing beside the deathbed of someone he had loved—that despite of his grief he had spent much of the time analyzing which pigments comprised the color of her eyelids. After having been driven to distraction by an organ grinder across the street from his Rome apartment, Pietro Mascagni finally politely demonstrated to the man how to operate the instrument less loudly. Later to find him wearing a sign while performing: Pupil of Mascagni. 

No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on. Said Voltaire. Rilke was raised as a girl—in girl’s clothing—until he started school at the age of seven. The Rilke who would later devotedly collect lace. And maintain apartments habitually overflowing with roses. I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it. Said Gorky re Tolstoy. How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate. But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one’s stomach. 

Coleridge fell off horses. Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides. He is not writing about something; he is writing something. Said Samuel Beckett re Joyce. We advise no woman to read this book. Said a first review of Père Goriot. Schopenhauer’s mother Johanna wrote novels. When she playfully belittled his own first book, Schopenhauer told her it would still be available long after hers were forgotten. Indeed, the entire first printing would still be, Johanna Schopenhauer said. 

The sky can never be merely a background. Said Alfred Sisley. Stalin read Hemingway. I’ve been shitting, so ’tis said, nigh twenty-two years through the same old hole, which is not yet frayed one bit. Wrote Mozart to his cousin Anna Maria Thekla. Émile Zola’s terror of thunder and lightning—so extreme that he not only shut all windows and lit every nearby lamp, but even sometimes blindfolded himself. The oddity that Velazquez and Picasso, surely two of the three greatest Spanish-born painters, each used his mother’s name rather than his father’s. 

Spinoza, who spent his last years in a single attic room in The Hague—and slept in some variant or other of what is now called a Murphy bed. Spinoza. Shoving or yanking or hoisting or whatever, to force the unstable whatchamacallit up against the wall each morning. The next best thing to God. Edna O’Brien called literature. My music is best understood by children and animals. Said Stravinsky. 

Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men. Says the opening of Book XI of the Iliad. Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men. Says the opening of Book V of the Odyssey.

The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading. Announced Petronius. You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one. Flaubert put it. Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything—and would turn aside in the middle of a conversation to scribble down something he himself had just said that he realized he might possibly later be able to use. Novalis died while listening to a relative play the piano. Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. Said Jules Renard. 

E.M. Forster’s astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow. Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome. An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do. Said Dylan Thomas. Samuel Johnson’s compulsive inability to stroll past a picket fence without superstitiously touching each separate picket as he went. The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet: Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said. In Robert Schumann’s diary, after first meeting with Berlioz: There is something very pleasant about his laugh. Lenin played tennis. I don’t very much enjoy looking at painting in general. I know too much about them. Said Georgia O’Keeffe. 

People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort. Said Eliot. A real good guy. William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson. The first requirement for a composer is to be dead. Said Arthur Honegger. A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell—only it seems places and people have English names there. Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights. 

Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate. Kant said. Thinking with someone else’s brain. Schopenhauer called reading. Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid every one of his bills—electric, phone, whatever—on the same day that it arrived. Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne? 

Karl Marx regularly read Shakespeare aloud to his young children. Don’t keep talking to me about nature, said Corot. All I see out there are Corots. What needs to be said is best said twice. Said Empedocles. I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed. Said Swift. 

The severest test of the imagination—is to name a cat. Said Samuel Beckett. Because of a promise to his mother, Jorge Luis Borges recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of his life. Even though I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line. I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains. Allegedly said Diogenes. G.E. Moore was known to appear at his Cambridge classroom in bedroom slippers. The Greatest Novel Reader in the World. Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested her own epitaph could well be. Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung. Said Voltaire—describing opera.

One author pilfers the best of another. And calls it tradition. Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 B.C. Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton—at which Merton devoured six martinis. You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair. Said Picasso. Karl Marx died sitting at his desk.

The friendship of Zola and Cézanne. Tracing back to when they were boys of twelve and thirteen. I absolutely cannot do without it. Said Tchaikovsky’s diary, about alcohol. Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano. Rafael Alberti remembered of him. Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones. How strange, Diogenes finally decided—that I cannot make a distinction between those of your father and those of his slaves.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet. Suspected Elizabeth Bishop. Reality is under no obligation to be interesting. Said Borges. Borges’ vision of Paradise: A kind of library. Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four. Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed. Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old. The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them. Said François Mauriac. 

I just pretend. Explained Laurence Olivier. Poetry makes nothing happen. Auden said. Me retracto de todo lo dicho, I take back everything I told you. Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings. Everything useful is ugly. Said Gautier. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything. Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story. 

Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death. Sit in thy cell—and thy cell shall teach thee all things. Said Saint Anthony. One’s first glass of the day is a great event. Acknowledged Thackeray. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to be, Johnson said. 

Far too much music finishes far too long after the end. Judged Stravinsky. Conclusions are the weak point of most authors. George Eliot said. Proust’s excessively lavish over tipping. Wondering how on earth one remembers—that when St. John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent—was of pears simmered with cinnamon. 

Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt: How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation. One must go on working. And one must have patience. Rodin told Rilke. Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. Wittgenstein once suggested. 

The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play. Perceives Pascal. In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck: Als ick kan—the best I can do. It is later than you know. Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock—after having broken off its hands. Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye: I always made an awkward bow. 

Als ick kan.