Today's subject line comes from the last paragraph of George Whitman's obituary in the New York Times:

Mr. Whitman had variously called himself a communist, a utopian and a humanist. But he may have also been a romantic himself, at least concerning his life's work. "I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions -- just a few old socks and love letters," he wrote in his last years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, "and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart."

That's Whitman's manifesto at the top of this entry. This is the BYM in front of Shakespeare & Company, browsing through a book on the Japanese economy:



This is what the rest of the front patio looks like on a chilly November night:



Lori-Lyn asks (in her "Loving 2011" series), What books made an impression on you this year? One of them was Mademoiselle London Hearts Paris (Sometimes), which I picked up on impulse inside S&Co. I especially like the poem that starts out with her throwing rocks at Hemingway's geraniums.

While in Paris, I deliberately searched for Yves Bonnefoy's translations of Yeats's poems (which I eventually picked up at the Gallimard shop, along with Fuzier and Denis's translations of Donne into French). The thing is, I knew about their existence because I'd come across part of Bonnefoy's rendition of The Circus Animals' Desertion. [I'd post some of the Bonnefoy here, but JournalScape turns diacritical marks into gibberish. There's a mirror of this post at Vary the Line with excerpts from "La desertion des animaux du cirque."]

Anyway, the last words for tonight should be Monsieur Whitman's, non?