Well, Ruskin being still another of the assignments I skipped, was doubtless what.

And what I more truthfully happen to feel in regard to John Ruskin is sorry for him.

This is because of the silly man having spent so many years looking at so many ancient statues that he almost went into shock on his wedding night, what with nobody ever having told him that living women had pubic hair.

Normally, the person one might more probably feel sorry for under such circumstances would be Mrs. Ruskin. Except that she was sensible enough to soon go running off with John Everett Millais.

When I comment that she was sensible, incidentally, I do not mean only because she ran off, but because it was with Millais, who had been a child prodigy. Which is to say that he had been painting from models with no clothes on since he was eleven.

Sappho is said to have taught music, by the way.

Well, and Achilles also played an instrument.

I enjoy knowing both of those things.

Although I additionally know that Achilles had a mistress at Troy, named Briseis. Some of that does begin to get a little confusing, finally.

Actually, it is too bad that John Ruskin was not friendly with Robert Rauschenberg, who presumably could have thought up some way of rectifying things.

Ludwig has such a silly look, for a name, when one types it.

Doubtless I would have settled for calling a biography I had written myself simply Beethoven, too.

Although now what I tardily might wish I had done, while I was at the other house, was to see if any of the versions in that one-volume selection from the plays were by the translator who made Euripides sound as if he had been under the influence of William Shakespeare.

In spite of that, one has a fairly acute inkling as to when Medea is having her period also, incidentally.

And if it is true that Odysseus was away from Ithaca for twenty years, Penelope would have had hers approximately two hundred and fifty times.

I hardly mean to go on about this, even if one does now and again become preoccupied.

Especially while sitting here with a puffy face.

But all that I actually have in mind is all of that giveaway silence again, which would surely appear to verify that Samuel Butler was wrong about a woman having written the Odyssey.

How curious. Even when I had already begun typing that sentence, I would have sworn I still had no idea who it was who had made that suggestion.

So now I also remember that the translator who read Shakespeare too many times was named Gilbert Murray.

Other than that I have no notion of who Samuel Butler was, however, unless perhaps he was the same Samuel Butler who wrote The Way of All Flesh.

Although all I know about The Way of All Flesh, in turn, is that I would be pleased to hear that Ludwig Wittgenstein had not read one word of it.

Gilbert Murray, I believe one can meanwhile assume, was somebody who translated Greek plays.

When he was not reading Shakespeare.

Rubens painted a version of Achilles hiding among the women also, by the way.

Too, there is a drawing by him of Achilles slaying Hector, with a spear through the throat.

One of the things people generally admired about Rubens, even if they were not always aware of it, was the way everybody in his paintings is always touching everybody else.

Well, hardly including the way Achilles is touching Hector, obviously.

Meantime I may have made an error, earlier, in saying that where Rupert Brooke died during the first World War was at the Hellespont, by which I mean the Dardanelles.

Where I believe he actually died was on the island of Scyros, even though the latter is only a little bit south in the Aegean.

I bring this up only because Scyros was the same island on which Achilles did all that hiding.

Again, however, I am by no means implying that there is any significance in such connections.

Even if the child born to the woman on Scyros who Achilles made pregnant grew up to become the very soldier who threw Hector's little boy over the walls.

And after that became the husband of Helen's daughter Hermione.

Which in either case still leaves me in the dark as to how I know about Samuel Butler.

Although doubtless I read about him in a footnote, in one of the books about the Greeks I did pay attention to.

At any rate I unquestionably paid enough attention to be certain that Achilles's son would have been far too young to be at Troy when he was supposed to. And that Hermione would have been practically old enough to be his mother.

Then again I almost never read footnotes.

Though once I did read a lovely poem by Rupert Brooke, about Helen growing older.

Actually, the poem made her a nag.

Besides Briseis, the name of another mistress I remember is Jeanne Hebuterne, who had a child by Modigliani. Although that particular story is one of the saddest I know.

What happened was that Jeanne Hebuterne threw herself out of a window, on the morning after Modigliani died.

While again being pregnant.

The things women used to do, too, one is almost tempted to add.

What do any of us ever truly know, however?

And at least the word mistress had finally gone out of style.

Meanwhile, Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, has suggested that the Odyssey was written by a woman, I am assuming the footnote said.

Although doubtless there was rather more to it than that, it being a fairly safe guess that one does not change Homer from a man to a woman after three thousand years without including some sort of interesting explanation.

I have no idea what that explanation may have been, however.

Even though any number of people often insisted that there had never been any Homer to begin with, but were only various bards.

There having been no pencils then either, being a reason for that insistence.

Then again perhaps the footnote was in some book that had nothing to do with the Greeks at all.

Many books frequently containing things that are connected to other things that one would have never expected them to be connected to.

Even in these very pages that I am writing myself, for instance, one would have scarcely expected that T. E. Shaw would be connected to anything, even though I have only at this instant remembered that an additional book in the other house is a translation which was done by somebody with that identical name.

What it is a translation of is the Odyssey, in fact.

Then again, indicating that I now know approximately as much about T. E. Shaw as I know about Gilbert Murray may be less than the most impressive manner in which to make my point.

In either case, doubtless the footnote was in no way connected to the opera about Medea, even if that also now happens to be in my head.

Once, in Florence, sitting in a Land Rover with a right-hand drive and watching the piazza below Brunelleschi's dome fill up with snow, which must surely be rare, I listened to Maria Callas singing that.

I had only a few moments earlier switched vehicles, after carrying several suitcases across one of the bridges over the Arno, and so had not even noticed immediately that the new tape deck was set to the on position.

Medea was written by Luigi Cherubini, I might mention.

Basically, I do that because of Luigi Cherubini being somebody I often mix up with Vincenzo Bellini, who wrote Norma, which is another opera that Maria Callas frequently sang.

Although now and again I have mixed up Vincenzo Bellini with Giovanni Bellini in turn, even if Giovanni Bellini is one of the painters I have always most deeply admired.

Well, even Albrecht Dürer, whom I admire to almost the same degree, once said that Bellini was still the best painter alive.