Wittgenstein's Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page B

then in the window of a municipal gallery on a street near the Via Vittorio Veneto, there was my name on a poster.
    To tell the truth, it was Louise Nevelson's name that caught my eye first. But still.
    Sitting in an automobile with English license plates and a right-hand drive, only a day after that, I watched the Piazza Navona fill up with snow, which must surely be rare.
    Early in the Renaissance, although also in Rome, Brunelleschi and Donatello went about measuring ruins with such industry that people believed they were mad.
    But after that Brunelleschi returned home to Florence and put up the largest dome since antiquity.
    Well, this being one of the reasons they named it the Renaissance, obviously.
    It was Giotto who built the beautiful campanile next door to that same cathedral.
    Once, being asked to submit a sample of his work, what Giotto submitted was a circle.
    Well, the point being that it was a perfect circle.
    And that Giotto had painted it freehand.
    When my father died, less than a year after my mother, I came upon that same tiny mirror in a drawer full of old snapshots.
    An authentic snow falls in Rome no more than once every seventy years or so, as a matter of fact.
    Which is approximately how often the Arno overflows its banks too, at Florence. Though perhaps there is no connection there.
    Yet it is not impossible that people like Leonardo da Vinci or Andrea del Sarto or Taddeo Gaddi went through their entire lives without ever watching boys throw snowballs.
    Had they been born somewhat later they could have seen Bruegel's paintings of youngsters doing that, at least.
    I happen to believe the story about Giotto and the circle, by the way. Certain stories being gratifying to believe.
    I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.
    Conversely I do not believe one word of what I wrote, a few lines ago, about Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto and Taddeo Gaddi never seeing snow, which was ridiculous.
    Nor can I remember, any longer, if I happened onto the poster with my name on it before or after I saw the cat at the Colosseum.
    The cat at the Colosseum was orange, if I have not indicated, and had lost an eye.
    In fact it was hardly your most appealing cat, for all that I was so anxious to see it again.
    Simon had a cat, once. Which we could never seem to decide on a name for.
    Cat, being all we ever called it.
    Here, when the snows come, the trees write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. The sky itself is often white, and the dunes are hidden, and the beach is white down to the water's edge, as well.
    In a manner of speaking almost everything I am able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso.
    Now and again I build fires along the beach, however.
    Well, autumns, or in early spring, I am most apt to do that.
    Once, after doing that, I tore the pages out of a book and lighted those too, tossing each page into the breeze to see if the breeze might make it fly.
    Most of the pages fell right next to me.
    The book was a life of Brahms, which had been standing askew on one of the shelves here and which the dampness had left permanently misshapen. Although it had been printed on extraordinarily cheap paper to begin with.
    When I say that I sometimes hear music in my head, incidentally, I often even know whose voice I am hearing, if the music is vocal music.
    I do not remember who it was yesterday for The Alto Rhapsody, however.
    I had not read the life of Brahms. But I do believe there is one book in this house which I did read, since I came.
    As a matter of fact one could say two books, since it was a two-volume edition of the ancient Greek plays.
    Although where I actually read that book was in the other house, farther down the beach, which I burned to the ground. The only book I have looked into in this house is an atlas, wishing to remind myself where Savona is.
    As a matter of fact I did that not ten minutes ago, when I