Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📗

with. It was a page from a diary, or a testament of some kind, and I copied it out because it was worth keeping:

Saturday, June 1, 11:50 PM

For the last time I think of my wife, and I beg her to forgive my wrongs just as I forgive hers and put them aside. I would try to warn her if I had any time left. (But in any case, she wouldn’t believe me.) The supreme moment has come for her, for me, for all men, and we shall not see the sun rise tomorrow. My impressions, therefore, were not mistaken. Through the open window I can see the sky, mortal and black, and a wind as hot as human breath brushes me, a wind that never blew on this earth before.

On the night of June 2, there was indeed a hot wind from the north but it was merely the one we call the foehn. The cook, who didn’t know these mountains, must have thought it strange.

Humanity is not responsible, not guilty: we submit to our fate. We love death. The death of others, and what’s more, in these precipitous times and without knowing it, our own. But this is no suicidal rapture, nor the death instinct posited by psychology. In reality, man is passive. It is death that acts, summoning man. Death’s roll call cannot go unanswered. Pleased that we consent, silently but unanimously, It will come to take us tonight, sparing us the agony and the anguish of dying. This final chapter, for many or for all of us, will resolve insoluble problems, it will be the unexpected remedy for unbearable ills. How strange that in other times the millennium, the end of days, was considered a cruel punishment, when in fact it is so fair and good. As for myself, will it come prematurely in my twenty-seventh year? No. I am with them and one of them. First, an involuntary instrument, now I offer myself as an object of death.

I translate this in my own words, but the substance of the message (Hölderlinesque, I should say) is clear. “An instrument of death,” this good fellow who crowned the Saint-Honorés with whipped cream and custard? A doleful prophet at his solitary desk as the end came near. I imagine him as a dilettante exegete, interpreting Nostradamus. A Millenarian, or a Jehovah’s Witness.

What strikes me is his social status. He was far from belonging to the intelligentsia. This final page of his, although it borrows from common prophesies and judgments, rings true.

And I, seeking “guarantees” receive an astonishing, reassuring one from him.

13

YOUR TEMPERAMENT is repetitive, Karpinsky told me.

Repetition, in the sense that psychiatrists use the word, is a quality that may have helped me to adapt. But I’d give the credit above all to my nominalism. I’ve always been a nominalist; society doesn’t exist, what exist are groups, or rather the individual, to put it simply.

The only reality that a man must take into account is the one he creates as an individual.40 The statement isn’t mine, it is Charles Reich’s, but there’s truth to it.

The night of June 2 brought thinking life to an end, and thus History. Maybe. In the meantime, the rain has also come to an end, and I take advantage of the pause to climb the road and then the track that leads up to the Malga Ross, and this problem of the end of History grows less worrisome. The res gestae, the deeds accomplished, don’t necessarily imply a plurality of gerentes, of actors; history could carry on with just one person, for one person. In Widmad this morning I smashed the window of a shop to take two grapefruits. So as a historian, let me record that anarchy has prevailed with the defeat of its primal enemy, private property. At the same time a monarchy has been installed, in the most elementary meaning of the term: all power to one man. Anarchy and monarchy coexist, now and in me. No one possesses me; I possess all. In theory I could take the Codex Atlanticus or the Gutenberg Bible and carry it home, and no one would report me; I could call myself a philosopher and no one would contest it; I could proclaim perpetual peace on earth and be sure it wouldn’t be breached. In theory . . .

The mule track that leads up the bottom slopes of Mountàsc is wide and comfortable; it’s paved with stone slabs that rise in steps, neatly squared off. Worthy of the name it bears, or did once, the Via Romana. A sort of mountain Via Appia climbing past sober stands of larch, trees even plainer than the Mediterranean cypresses of the Appian Way. Across the valley, no more than 300 meters away as the crow flies, I can see the mouth of the cave of the siphon. Cave of the futile invitation. I think of the testament I found in that attic apartment, the words mixing ingenuous rhetoric and genuine desperation: Death’s roll call cannot go unanswered. But I, for one, did not respond. I was resistant to the call, evidently. Courageous or coward, I survived.

Maybe it was neither courage nor cowardice, but a kind of armored mediocrity that provided me a pardon just for that reason. An insignificant individual was chosen to embody continuity, a mysterious choice that may contain some wisdom. The mule track comes to an end where the larch trees end, and the path narrows so much that a single person can barely pass. How did the Ross family get their enormous Fleckvieh cows up here? Then again, maybe the melancholy cook from the Mayr wasn’t wrong in his farewell message, apart from his romantic conception of death. If it’s hard to believe that death could take the voice of a siren to seduce men, it’s certainly true that men, whether they knew it or not, wanted to die. For years, for decades. Pollution: the polluters sullied themselves first and foremost: “I live in