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

fierce Latin. Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, quia beatitudo per hoc magis complacebit.38 The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned so that their bliss might be more pleasing to them. Supposing I am damned, my good friend Mylius (who won’t forgive me two things, Henriette’s visits and my thirty-nine years, for he was fifty-nine) when he looks out from his heaven will be pleased to see me in hell. I don’t doubt he will feel repaid. And how will Professor Mylius fare in the kingdom of heaven, with his bliss? Will it be like those sabbaticals at Princeton that he so envied his more illustrious colleagues?

Meanwhile I, too, have compensations, although I am excluded. Silence is not one of my punishments; from dusk to dawn, noisy dormice gnaw busily on the roof beams. They gnaw all night, and in the morning I find sawdust on the ground below. This is no mere mania to destroy; it has been said they sharpen their teeth this way, to better unshell wild nuts and berries in the woods. The marmots, when they dig their burrows, lining them with leaves and stocking them with small dead animals for the winter, make a cry like the whimper of their little ones. When the courting season is over, the long-eared owl grows reticent and is heard only at great intervals, while the little owl keeps sounding his musical calls, and the closer he is to his nest, the more he sings. The afternoons are loud with cuckoos; the evenings ring with the woodpecker and his strange call, like the hinges creaking on an old iron-bound castle door. I call him the Gothic bird.

There’s my thundering creek, and because of the abundant rain, countless runnels flashing down the mountain, silver threads harmonious and strong despite the wind that ruffles them. When the wind rises, it carries their voices right into the house.

Nature seems unaware of the night of June 2. Maybe she is gladdened to have all of life to herself again, now that the brief intermezzo known to us as history is closed. She has no regrets or misgivings, I am sure.

12

TODAY I share nature’s indifference, or should I say abhorrence. So much so that I ask myself if this intermezzo is really over, or won’t simply start up again in a moment, a naughty prankster. Given that they were neither necessary, nor helpful.

I consult my personal mass spectrometer. I find no results on black (hatred), but on gray (fear), yes, often; and on the ashy yellow of annoyance, the data is strong. The sample ranges from the ascetic vampirism of “early detectors” to the injurious pettiness of acquaintances, the inevitable frictions of daily life. The colleague who came to visit and asked “why in heaven’s name” had I chosen to live in this “goatherd’s hut”? The book contract with swindler clauses, like the one stipulating that “The Publisher assumes no obligation as to when the Work may appear in print . . .”

I’m no longer the pious Antigone contemplating funeral monuments. I’ve moved into the phase of psychic disconnection, of coming unglued. Incoherence. Fluctuating states of mind in a rarefied atmosphere. Today I’m assailed by small animosities, marginal episodes that date back to “my old age” and are generally quite overlookable. This one, among the many, comes to mind, I don’t know why.

The editor used to allot each of us new staff members one column in the paper in turn. The piece I managed to push through once was somewhat pompously titled “Against formalism and conformism: examining some stereotypes” and was meant to be the first of a series. It was dedicated to two terms, alienation and prostitution, circumscribing the first and amplifying the second. I proposed that “alienation” be limited to what the later Marx intended. A worker who is in a position to manage his own employment, if he so desires, and thus be an inventive electrician or a creative blacksmith, yet who prefers the assembly line for the guaranteed paycheck, has no right to consider himself a victim of alienation. As for professional prostitution, it would rightly include those women who legally prostitute themselves with a husband they don’t love, or don’t love anymore, but who continue to accept the ease and creature comforts with which he pays them. The bourgeois ladies were virtuous, the unions philistine, I was told contemptuously. The editor threatened to fire me, I had attacked “the circulation.”

An extreme left group had joined the Zero Population Growth movement for birth control (unusual, the left being optimistic, agnostic about sex, and anti-Malthusian); they asked me to speak on the radio and I was happy to do so. Mine was a brief sermon, eight minutes. The following day the program management distanced themselves from my views but I continued to get anonymous phone calls at home for quite a while, invariably along the lines of “You filthy, depraved unmarried bastard.” My reply: “I can still change that. I haven’t even turned twenty-four.” Or else I would put a record on and play into the receiver a silly French song that was popular at the time, “Les célibataires sont si malheureux”39: “Bachelors are unhappy men / We’d better say a prayer for them / Because they’re always on their own, / And lay themselves to bed alone.”

I never had much luck in my few radio appearances. Recently, after I’d given up political journalism, I sat at a so-called round table where I was able to pose the following question: If the press aspires to represent public opinion, as it claims to, why is it still monopolized by the journalist tribe, not more than 150 people in this whole country, editors in chief and managing editors? Open up to the public! Professional journalists could be responsible for reporting the news and offering comments, and those two tasks would be plenty to justify their existence. The rest, the bulk of the paper, would collaborate with the