Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📕

one passerby, not one car on the move. The first aid station was empty, so were the garages and the hotels. I thought I understood: Thanksgiving. June 2 is the national Day of Thanksgiving, a holiday devoted to fasting and prayer, when you neither buy nor sell, go neither on a hike nor to the football stadium, when the cafés and restaurants are closed, and my most pious compatriots (convinced they are the elect among us) remunerate Providence with that grace that so favors them. And they aren’t meant to worry about their neighbor’s troubles, so the injured in that upturned car will be waiting until tomorrow.

But newspapers do come out on Thanksgiving. The newsstand next to the station is closed, and so is the station, although it is lit up as if it were night. It’s empty, silent; there are no travelers and no rail workers. I sat on a platform and remained there waiting the rest of the morning. I didn’t see a single train. Were they on strike?

Come on. In the history books they say that even long ago during the Great Strike of 1919, the trains were running. Not only are we pious, we are a people of irreproachable services, a society in which labor peace is never disturbed, and the question is whether this is due to worker satisfaction and means the workers feel gratefully affectionate toward the system, with which they zealously cooperate. As for myself, an intellectual, unreceptive monad without obligations, the matter didn’t interest me; I instead paid tacit homage to the bourgeois bonhomie (so egotistical, so optimistic, so sturdily nationalistic) that sees a clear blue Alpine lake where another would diagnose a social swamp. Railroads are not highways; they don’t destroy the landscape, and that satisfies me.

Once they would have called me qualunquista, thirty years ago, a démobilisateur.15 Such labels are now out of fashion, luckily.

Truth is, and every tourist brochure will tell you so, our trains, from the day they were built, have never stopped running. This shutdown, and the absence of any staff in an important station like Widmad-Lewrosen, seemed very strange, but there was something else no less strange: when I passed by the Trinity Protestant Church, I gave the door a push and found it was locked up tight. I did the same at the Catholic church of St. Vilcifredo. It was open, but empty.

I was tired now, and after the night I’d had, I had a right to be, so I stopped knocking on doors. I took the path back up the mountain in thick fog, about a fifty-minute walk. Whether I wanted to or not, I must go home and—after this interval devoted to others—pick up the conversation with myself.

When you’ve been through something as deeply personal as I had that night, would picking up be painful, exhausting? Above all boring, I’d say.

It’s not just the aggressive unresolved problems, but siege by small beloved things. Small, clinging family things, objects that grab you, each one with its modest, tenacious prehensile charm. A photograph you took and framed, of April snow on the roof, the little imitation Bokhara rug you bought yourself for Christmas, your typewriter with a sheet of paper springing from the platen. The acetylene hunting lamp you don’t need but which looks perfect in the entryway, lit up bright red; the LP of Albinoni’s piano sonata. Each one of them with its heartrending appeal, its insidious allure, would like to draw you in, bind you, and is astonished that you were thinking . . . that you tried to . . . that you came back, they say . . . if you’re still here, however, it’s also because of us. And maybe they even know it’s not true, but they have to pretend to be delighted. The truth is, a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost. In seven days, in view of the final solution, I haven’t wound the clock or read the papers; it has been seven days since I took a bath, did the household accounts, opened the mail. The mail. Ball and chain, consummate emblem of routine. Proof positive the world exists. Mail announcing meetings, exhibits, and conferences, petty advertising, bimonthly tax statements (June–July), the insurance company with a printed greeting card: “Tomorrow you’ll be 40. Our best wishes and some friendly advice, do consider . . .”

Ah, the persecution of those recurrent wishes, for my birthday this time. My exclamatory friend Professor Mylius writes, “You’re about to embark on a second childhood, lucky fellow. Not without a little envy, I’d like to reiterate my warmest feelings of friendship.” Henriette, for her part: “Sunday June 2 is your day, and I’ll be there. Later on, in the early evening, but if you wish I’ll stay over until Monday.” She didn’t show up, actually. A cold, the fog, the trip all the way from Chrysopolis up here. “You would hole up at 1,400 meters.” Henrietta is my ex. I would describe her, with Flaubert in mind, as a sentimental miseducation. Having dutifully taken my bath, I pick up the notebook left by Frederica in the kitchen. Magazine, x francs; linens, x francs; one new floor mop; four liters milk; eggs, half a dozen.

4

HERE CONCLUDES the external report on the Event, and the internal one opens. But you won’t find me indulging in personal confessions because by now my personal story is history, the history of Mankind. I’m now Mankind, I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S). I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I spoke of myself in the third person: “Mankind said this, did that.” Because as of June 2, the third person