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

Generis to him is however almost certainly Morselli’s invention. Rosa Maria Monastra in “L’apocalisse ilarotragica di Guido Morselli” (Synaxis 24, Catania, 2010) argues convincingly that Morselli was just being playful and suggests that the concept of dissipatio seems more likely to have come from the Bible, Isaiah 24:3.

31 solvens saeclum in favilla: From the Latin hymn Dies Irae, which begins: Dies iræ, dies illa / Solvet sæclum in favilla. (“That day of wrath, that dreadful day / shall heaven and earth in ashes lay.”) English translation: the 1962 Missal.

32 Mundus permanebit. . . . Viri . . . : “The earth remains. . . . Men, women and children, human beings of all ages, classes, and nations shall suddenly be elevated [sublimabuntur].” The letter from Salvian he quotes from may also be Morselli’s invention.

33 Nihil huius gloriae decet peccatorem: “Nothing of this glory is fitting for a sinner.”

34 natural hominis tegumentum, quasi altera cutis: “man’s natural shell, as if another skin”

35 Deucalion: After Zeus provoked a great flood, Deucalion, who survived, was told to “cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder.” (The “mother” was Gaia and the “bones” were rocks.) The rocks, when thrown, became human beings.

36 asylum ignorantiae: Spinoza, an “asylum of stupidity”

37 “To drown in the abyss—heaven or hell, who cares”: From “Le voyage,” Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire, tr. Robert Lowell in Marthiel & Jackson Mathews, eds., The Flowers of Evil, New Directions, 1963.

38 Beati in regno coelesti . . . : English translation, James Lehrberger, The Thomist, vol. 80, 3, July 2016.

39 Les célibataires sont si malheureux: French pop song, an ironic celebration of bachelorhood, 1960, Sacha Distel. The refrain: Les célibataires sont si malheureux, / Il faut bien prier pour eux, / Cars ils sont si solitaires, / Se couchant toujours seuls dans leur lit. English translation kindly provided by Susan Barba.

40 The only reality: Probably from Charles Reich, The Greening of America, 1970, translated as La nuova America, Rizzoli, 1972.

41 the logic of function and fiction: From the Diario, December 7, 1966. Morselli questioned the Hegelian approach as overly anthropomorphic, for its conviction that “beyond the historical subject there was nothing that was not in function of man the subject or one of his ‘fictions,’ whether pragmatic or maybe just didactic.”

42 Woe to him that is alone (for there is no end to his toil): Ecclesiastes 4:10.

43 matter is far more prized: “At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot. So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation . . .” From Barthes, Mythologies, “Plastic,” first English edition, 1972. Barthes, 1957; Morselli read in 1962.

44 after the Cossacks had fired on the crowd: Morselli’s striking image doesn’t quite fit with the historical record. When in 1905, workers marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, they were mowed down by Cossacks with sabers before they reached the square.

45 “The stethoscope falls on a white coat”: Most likely, the rather insipid verses quoted are Morselli’s invention, possibly meant to be slightly derogatory.

46 “When mankind achieves true happiness”: In Constance Garnett’s 1916 translation of The Possessed, “When all mankind attains happiness then there will be no more time, for there’ll be no need of it, a very true thought.”

47 parking orbit: In astrophysics, a temporary orbit used in launching a satellite or vehicle into space; from the parking orbit a second launch is made to boost the object into its final orbit.

48 A parte objecti: as it exists objectively, rather than through the eyes of the observer

49 August Hermann Francke: Francke (1663–1727) was a German Lutheran clergyman and Biblical scholar who established influential teaching methods and founded schools.

50 miniloquent: understated, retiring; the opposite of magniloquent, the word miniloquente is quite unusual in Italian, if not Morselli’s invention.

51 Corvus corax, ill-omened birds of the battlefield: Carrion-eaters, ravens will feed on the bodies left out in a battlefield.