This book incorporates many quotations from other texts. I have tried to list those sources here, both for the information of interested readers and to avoid the appearance of taking credit for work that is not my own. Some of the quoted texts are still in copyright; I am grateful to the rights holders for their permission to use these excerpts in the novel.
The epigraph to this book is taken from Part II (also known as the ‘Philosophy of Psychology’ fragment) of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The translation from the original German in that instance is my own.
In the text of the novel itself, I quote several times from G. E. M. Anscombe’s translation of the same work. Here, I use the quote: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ Here, I quote: ‘The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.’ Later in the same paragraph, I quote: ‘Here saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third possibility!” – expresses only our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture’. Each of these quotes is taken directly from the 1958 edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.
The novel also includes several quotations from the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Here, I quote the words ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’, which are spoken by Hamlet in Act I, Scene ii of that play. Here, I use the words ‘Very proud, revengeful, ambitious. With more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in’ – this is another quote from Hamlet, though with altered punctuation, originally spoken by Hamlet in Act III, Scene i. Finally, here, the line ‘Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die’ is again from Hamlet, spoken by Gertrude in Act I, Scene ii.
Here, the phrase ‘In whose blent air all our compulsions meet’ is a quotation from Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, published 1954.
Here, ‘What lips my lips have’ is a reference to Edna St Vincent Millay’s 1920 poem ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’.
Here, the phrase ‘Dublin in the rare, etc.’ is a reference to the song ‘The Rare Ould Times’ or ‘Dublin in the Rare Ould Times’, composed by Pete St. John and first recorded by The Dublin City Ramblers in 1977.
Here, the phrase ‘And few could know’ is a quotation from William Wordsworth’s 1798 poem ‘She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways’.
Here, the phrase ‘Mixing memory and desire’ is taken from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, 1922.
Here, the words ‘Love’s austere and lonely offices’ are taken from Robert Hayden’s 1962 poem ‘Those Winter Sundays’.
here, the words ‘In their autumn beauty’ are quoted from W. B. Yeats’s 1917 poem ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.
Here, the words ‘Thank you, Bobby Fischer!’ paraphrase the final words of Bobby Fischer’s 1961 article ‘A Bust to the King’s Gambit’: ‘Thank you, Weaver Adams!’ That article advocated 3 … d6 as a response to the King’s Gambit in a variation now known as the Fischer Defense.
Here, Peter mentally quotes the phrases ‘copper stepped saucer dome’ and ‘Portland stone balustraded parapet’ from the technical description of the Fourt Courts on the Buildings of Ireland website (buildingsofireland.ie), a national architectural heritage service run by the Department of Housing.
Here, the phrase ‘Woman much missed’ is a reference to Thomas Hardy’s 1914 poem ‘The Voice’. Later in the same chapter, here, the line ‘Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then’ is another quotation from the same source.
Here, the phrase ‘Forever warm and still to be enjoyed’ is taken from John Keats’s 1819 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, though with modernised spelling. Keats is quoted once more, here, where the phrase ‘bubbles winking at the brim’ is taken from his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
Here, the line ‘These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I’ve wanted everything’ is a quotation from Henry James’s 1904 novel The Golden Bowl.
In Chapter 10, Ivan’s analysis of Sylvia’s logic puzzle is influenced by the work of the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, particularly the theory of descriptions first proposed in Russell’s 1905 paper ‘On Denoting’. The concept of ‘vacuous truth’ is an artefact of the development and application of truth tables in philosophy and mathematics; the originator of the truth table was Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Here, the line ‘I begin to like them at that age’ is a quotation from the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses.
Here, the line ‘We need an erotics of environmentalism’ is a paraphrase of the final line of Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’: ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’
Here, the phrase ‘Not one single serious line in it’ is a quotation from James Joyce on the subject of his novel Ulysses, from an interview with Djuna Barnes in 1922.