Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >
> >I remember reading an anecdote of somebody seeing a copy of Sartre's
> >Being and Nothingness
Someone left a copy of it lying around the English Teaching Fellows office at Michigan; I picked it up and opened it at random & tried to read . . . .
They tell a story of a man (back in mid 19th c.) who became ill and fell into a delerium for several days. While he was 'out' someone left a stack of new books by his bedside. Among them was a copy of Browning's _Sordello_. He picked it up, read half a page or so, and began calling for the nurse: he feared he had lost his mind or was slipping back into delerium. The first line of the poem is "Who will can hear Sordello's story told." The last line is, "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told." Someone claimed that they were the only intelligible lines in the poem. I thought it not that obscure, and rather more exciting than _Ring & the Book_. (Can't find the book on my shelves so quoted from memory.)
Carrol