Dissipatio H.G. Guido Morselli (best time to read books .txt) 📖

users, the readers, a joint participation that would certainly be unregulated, discordant, and partial, but still the only way to give voice to an authentic public opinion. One of my colleagues said, very politely, that I didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of what it meant to put out a newspaper. Others stood up to the microphone to declare I was out of my mind.

Remains of petty resentments. Small stuff. I had conveniently forgotten about them. Why they bob up again now I have no idea.

•

The directors, the editors, the writers, colleagues, ex-colleagues, and “friends” are now on the other side. Walking the bare hills of Mount Armageddon. Waiting for the final judgment, wary, they dig into the ash with their fingernails, covering the telex and the typewriters to which they’re (rightly) chained. Angels on guard watch that they don’t escape. They are three black angels, the same before whom idolaters prostrated themselves when they were alive. Each bears a shield: on one shield is written “sociologism,” on another “historicism,” on the third “psychologism.” At the foot of the hill, two snakes creep by, hissing and spitting fire. One has scales that spell out “advertising,” and the other, “marketing.”

I admit, it’s not very original as an apocalyptic vision.

It’s pretty implausible; I need more details. The waiting throngs giggle and exchange notes. Dies illa? Non creditur. Le jugement dernier? Incroyable. Das jüngste Gericht? Unmöglich. Doomsday? You’re kidding!

Ideas contain the solvent that activates them when they come alive and blocks them when they don’t. Without that productive solvent, they are flimsy, nebulous, but thanks to that nebulosity, whatever catastrophe comes, they can resist.

Resist and reemerge. Ideas are like a phoenix (a noisy, featherless phoenix, a caged bird). For the phoenix, there is no end of the world, or the end of the world is just an opportunity to rise up and take charge. There is nothing to hope for or to fear.

•

Robinson Crusoe kept track of time by carving notches on a post, something that would never have entered the head of that other well-known sailor and castaway, Ulysses. Crusoe, the modern man, was suspended between two disbeliefs; he no longer trusted the natural knowledge that correctly registers the passing of the days and nights, and he also had little faith (rightly so) in ich-Zeit, his “own” time. Those forms of disbelief have grown sharper and more complicated for us. Our bête noire is naïve realism, and it’s as naïve to think that time and space are objective realities as it is to think that a child loves his mother when he actually lusts for her. We no longer register nature’s time, while the time we “possess” gets confused with that pap of sensations and impressions, that subjectivity we’ve made of the external world, distorting its qualities and its measure.

I should have marked the days on a calendar, after June 2. But I had no calendar, nor watch that reports the date. Before, I relied on the newspapers to keep track of the days. I shunned those artificial counters that provide yet another sort of time: one that standardizes and abolishes the pauses, even as the devices that surround us multiply to infinity. Our haste is pathological, an anxiety to consume life.

Today a problem presented itself: to recover, out of this confusion of times, a credible temporal dimension. Recover it or confirm it; in truth I wasn’t completely oblivious and an instinct told me that two whole weeks, at the least, have gone by since the Event. Well, the problem was resolved in the simplest way, by means of chrono-cheese.

There’s a certain type of white, buttery imported cheese (a bit like Neufchâtel) that I like a lot when it’s fresh, and often eat. I was at the Mayr to do my “shopping,” that is, to replenish supplies. As I passed by the dumbwaiter in the kitchen, I caught a whiff of a sharp, disagreeable odor. When I opened the door I found a large tray of cheeses, among them that imported one I like. Covered by a layer of mold. Long, thick greenish filaments, real vegetation. I plunge my finger in and find the mold is a couple of centimeters deep. As I’m something of an expert on cheeses, I conclude that a layer of mold like that needed fifteen days at least to form. This is no laughing matter. Chrono-cheese is no less empirical than carbon-dating. And no more a matter of opinion.

I believe my estimate of the time that has passed is pretty accurate. It’s important because the probability that the Event is reversible diminishes with the days that go by. The “dear ones who’ve vanished” become each day, with more certainty, the “dear departed.”

The social machinery was able to grind tirelessly, indefinitely, so long as it never stopped even for an instant. Uninterrupted continuity—or immediate decomposition. According to that logic, it’s unlikely it can now resume work. But I wonder, can I depend on that?

•

The Mayr’s kitchen and nearby rooms have more surprises in store.

At Widmad, as at Lewrosen, I feed the dogs, which are locked inside the gates of the gardens and starving. From the mansard window of an attic room at the Mayr comes a whimpering lament. I go up to the room and find a large dog prisoner there, no signs of rabies, no fear of water. The animal had drunk a little from the sink and was hungry; the packet of biscuits found in a drawer that had kept it alive had been devoured right down to the paper wrapping. I opened the door but the dog didn’t move. Its owner hadn’t gone out, and the dog figured he was still there and refused to leave him.

From some of the clothing hanging on the coat rack, the owner appeared to have been a cook at the hotel. On the night of the Event, he had been sitting at a desk, writing. A foreigner, he was writing in his own language, which I’m pretty familiar