Then again, very likely there had been a pharmacy or a movie theater with the name Savona on it, at the least, and I had simply not been paying attention.

Although I am now next to positive that the numeral on the back of the shirt was a seven.

Or a seventeen.

In fact it was a twelve.

Once, I was one hundred percent positive that I was in a town called Lititz, in Pennsylvania, without having any genuine reason for being positive about that at all.

As a matter of fact I had been equally positive, only moments earlier, that I was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, until a name on a pharmacy or a movie theater indicated otherwise.

Even then, I also understood that there could easily be a pharmacy in Lancaster called the Lititz Pharmacy, just as there could be a movie theater in Savona called the Rimini. Or the Perugia.

Nonetheless I was one hundred percent positive that I was in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

I also believe that I was still wearing that same soccer shirt now and again at the Tate Gallery, in London, on chilly mornings when I was carrying in water from the Thames.

Or when I was enjoying Turner's own paintings of water.

I did not keep any of the additional shirts when I abandoned that particular Volkswagen van, however, which only this tardily has to strike me as thoughtless.

Obviously, since I so enjoyed wearing the one shirt, ordinary common sense ought to have told me to keep some of the others.

Then again, doubtless I had no idea that I was going to develop such a fondness for it, at the time.

For that matter it might just as easily have happened that I waited for my own garments to dry completely, in which instance I would have never developed any such feelings about the shirt to begin with.

What was to have prevented me from listening to Maria Callas singing Medea with nothing on at all, even, while I waited?

Actually it was quite warm, as I remember.

But now heavens.

Obviously it would have hardly been Maria Callas singing with nothing on, but only me myself listening that way.

What ridiculousness one's language still does insist upon coming up with.

And in either event I had already put on the shirt.

And had also incidentally listened long enough to understand that what Maria Callas was singing was not Medea by Luigi Cherubini after all, but was Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti.

It was the famous mad scene in the latter which finally led me to understand this.

Gaetano Donizetti being still another person whom I otherwise might have mixed up with Vincenzo Bellini. Or with Gentile Bellini, who was also Andrea Mantegna's brother-in-law, being Giovanni Bellini's brother.

Well, I did mix him up. With Luigi Cherubini.

Music is not my trade.

Although Maria Callas singing that particular scene has always sent shivers up and down my spine.

When Vincent Van Gogh was mad, he actually once tried to eat his pigments.

Well, and Maupassant, eating something much more dreadful than that, poor soul.

That list becomes distressingly longer.

Even Turner, in his way, having such a phobia about not letting a single person ever see him at work.

As a matter of fact Euripides was said to have lived in a cave, for that identical reason.

Although Gustave Flaubert once wrote Maupassant a letter, telling him not to spend so much time rowing.

On my honor, Flaubert once wrote Maupassant that.

In fact the letter also told him not to spend so much time with prostitutes either.

Had he wished, Flaubert could have written this same letter to Brahms, come to think about it, although I know of no record of that.

Actually, he could have even written only part of the same letter to Brahms, and the earlier part to Alfred North Whitehead.

When Gertrude Stein first met Alfred North Whitehead, she said that a little bell rang in her head, informing her that he was a genius.

The only other time Gertrude Stein had ever heard the same bell was when she first met Picasso.

Doubtless it is generally more difficult than this to tell just who is mad and who is not, however.

In St. Petersburg, when he finally did find out how to get there, Dostoievski appeared to believe that everybody one met at all belonged in this category, or certainly that is the impression one is given.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness, which happens to be one more sentence that I now remember I once underlined.

Where I underlined this one was in the identical book in which I underlined one of the others, and which was also the book that Jane Avril always kept right beside her bed, as a matter of fact.

This being the Pensees, by Pascal.

I believe I would have liked Jane Avril.

Well, and I certainly would have found it agreeable to tell Pascal how fond I am of his two sentences.

Don't bother to get up, I would have even been delighted to insist.

Actually, Euripides was finally forced to go into exile.

This was not because he did not have enough seclusion in his cave, however, but because of things he had said that certain people did not approve of.

Aristotle had to go into exile, too.

For that matter Socrates had to take poison.

One can be startled to remember that all of these things happened in Greece, I imagine, from where all arts and all freedoms came.

Although several of Andrea Mantegna's frescoes were destroyed by bombs during the second World War, and that was in Italy.

Still, many sorts of lists would appear to grow longer.

October twenty-fifth, Picasso's birthday was.

Even if I have no way of telling when it is ever October twenty-fifth.

Or any other date.

Simon's was July thirteenth.

In any event I do not believe I have heard Maria Callas again even once, since that day.

Well, I have scarcely been changing vehicles at all, lately.

Then again I have heard Joan Baez. And Kathleen Ferrier. And Kirsten Flagstad.

How I have heard these people is in much the same manner that Gertrude Stein heard her little bell, basically.

Although where I also heard Kirsten Flagstad was on a tape deck at the tennis courts.

Perhaps I have not mentioned the tennis courts.

The tennis courts are beside the road one takes to the town. The reason I have not mentioned them is that I have had no reason to mention them.

Nor would I have any reason to mention them now, were I not explaining about Kirsten Flagstad.

What happened was that one afternoon I decided to play tennis.

I did not decide to play tennis.

What I decided to do was to hit some tennis balls.

The tennis balls I decided to hit were not the same tennis balls that I once rolled down the Spanish Steps, incidentally. There is a small shed beside the tennis courts, which is where I had discovered these.

The tennis balls that I rolled down the Spanish Steps had been in a carton in the rear of a Jeep, I believe.

These tennis balls were in cans. Had they not been in cans, I am quite certain they would have lost their bounce some time before, and so doubtless I would not have decided to hit any to begin with.

One can hardly hit tennis balls which have lost their bounce, which I understood even when the idea first came into mind.

There were racquets in the shed also. The strings on most of those had become loose as well, but I selected one on which they had become less loose than on the others.

For perhaps an hour I opened cans and hit tennis balls across one of the nets.

There were no nets, those having been ruined by weather some time before as well.

Well, there were remnants of nets.

One pretends they are more than remnants.

Or that one of them is more than that, which is all that is required to hit tennis balls across.