NASA keeps a five millennium catalog of all the eclipses (both solar and lunar) that have occurred or will occur since 1999 B.C. to the year A.D. 3000.… vox

“At his large dinner party –there were about sixty guests– Marcel tried a dangerous stratagem: that of seating people next to each other who normally should have been at each other’s throats. Léon Daudet was surprised to learn that that ‘ravishing young lady’ next to him was the daughter of a well-known Jewish banker. Daudet’s wonder increased as he realized other tables resembled his own, where ‘rabid enemies’ calmly ‘chewed their cold-jellied chicken within two meters of each other.” He attributed this tour de force, which no one else in Paris could have achieved, to the ‘torrents of understanding and good will that emanated from Marcel, spreading in whirlwinds and spirals through the dining room.’ The host was delighted that his risky little experiment in social chemistry had succeeded. He modestly explained to Daudet that everything depended on how smoothly and adroitly the introductions, the first contacts, were carried out. Marcel had done this brilliantly, insulating those seated at each table in generous buffers of his charm.” (Marcel Proust, A Life. William C. Carter. pp.302.)

‘αὐτίκα τεθναίην, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄρ᾽ἔμελλον ἑταίρῳ
κτεινομένῳ ἐπαμῦναι

let me die soon, since I was not destined to come to the aid of my companion while he was slain [Perseus: Greek / English]

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“She painted canvases of an originality that might some day be noted, and in the meantime, since her retirement from teaching, she was combining her painting with travel and trying to evade her neurasthenia through the distraction of making new friends in new places. Perhaps some day she would come out on a kind of triumphant plateau as an artist or as a person or even perhaps both. There might be a period of five or ten years in her life when she would serenely climb over the lightning-shot clouds of her immaturity and the waiting murk of decline. But perhaps is the right word to use. It would all depend on the next two years or so.” (Tennessee Williams, Night of the Iguana.)

Very casually undertaken, the page numbers here refer to the Penguin edition of 2011. “Brown” in On The Road (Jack Kerouac): 77, 80, 82, 88, 89, 146, 188, 193, 216, 226, 260, 263, 266, 270, 271, 273, 280, 280, 283, 284.

“I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.” Lyn Hejinian, My Life (pp.65).

The etymology for “California” being in dispute I wonder if califourchon might assert a claim, thinking of baja california as being “straddled” by the sea?–

Reviens à califourchon sur ce fameux âne qui t’accompagne toujours dans la mémoire dela postérité…. Baudelaire