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

my factory yard, even though I have a house in town,” says one company owner. It was violence, first and foremost against themselves. A young man charged with armed robbery is asked whether it was necessary to shoot at the cashier. He replies, “I don’t know why I shot the cashier, I wanted to shoot myself.”

But in their explicit self-awareness, the melancholy cook, the armed robber, and the kamikaze factory owner weren’t typical. On the larger scale the death race took place in silence, impelled by a pressing, unacknowledged need. And that silence, as well as the absence of obvious cultural or economic motives, meant that our poor, sad discipline of sociology ignored the matter, although there were some who kept their eye on it. The chief of the New Jersey state highway patrol, a perfectly ordinary official, told reporters: You speak of “carelessness” when you write about the Sunday slaughter on the highways, but carelessness is not the cause, just the means. Drivers are careless because they intend to die. Because they don’t want to go home. Take away their cars and they will throw themselves from a window.

The path widens as it levels out, or rather, it disappears into the vast basin of the Ross pastures, clothed with heather, and junipers and clear brooks that run between boulders growing lichens, and some of those boulders are in themselves perfect small mountains. The glaciers of Mountàsc open like a fan, and I remember having seen them burst into flames at dawn, above the snowfields that still held the color of night. At the height of its triumphant evolution, the self searched out the most direct route to the non-self: not slow descent into entropy but swift and total self-destruction, and it didn’t have to be painless. The cupio dissolvi, the “wish to dissolve.” Freud called it the death drive, or instinct, and universalized it, assigning it to everyone. In his day, it was a wanton abstraction even to him. A harmless philosopheme, not even very original for that matter, to set against the dogma of omnipresent Eros for the symmetry. Freud was quietly bourgeois: how dismayed he’d have been if he’d ever thought that human experience would confirm his death drive, and even surpass it.

•

The glaciers of Mountàsc are becoming visible, although today it’s easy to confuse them with the low, uniformly white sky, and because the Karessa glaciers on the other side can also be seen, they, too, confused with the clouds, I have the impression it is all just one mass, a curving vault, and there’s no sky and I’m standing in the middle of an immense frozen cave. Two mountain ranges hold it up, for now. At any moment it could crack and collapse, or just slide slowly down onto these rocks, and me.

Note: human beings were not pursuing a collective catastrophe; they’d already carried out a first, limited trial of that at Hiroshima, and found it was within their means. They were seeking separate, individual deaths, and in this they stayed close to the traditions of conventional suicide: in the family car with wife and children; or at the bank where only a few clients and the tellers were witnesses; in a hijacked plane, with no more than seventy or eighty fellow passengers. The atomic holocaust, so much in keeping with ancient eschatology, was too spectacular, or too “social.” Eschatology: who today, in this world of computers and supersonic planes, knows anything about that archaic and abstruse science? No, even if the cupio dissolvi collectively willed it, the actual dissolution had to take place in private, which is individualism’s sacred altar. To each his own, wherever and however his particular fate or his customs and interests lead him. All to the same end, but not in a crowd. Sociologism, that collectivizing god, had to make peace with its opposite in extremis. Cows and goats, Giovanni would have said.

•

And so it was, they got what they wanted.

This, then, is the famous Malga Ross. The Ross who gave this Alpine pasture its name were distant relatives of my family, and I used to come up here when I was just a boy. I come back experimentally now, in search of the metus silvanus (dread of the forest) and the ancient pavor montium (fear of the mountains) of fables. This isn’t merely academic. The disappearance of the reverential fear that vast, uncontaminated nature once inspired in man is one of the vital impairments our age suffers from. Here there is no one between me and nature; the crags and the ice are sheer solitude and immensity, and I must salvage nature and taste it again. The Ross kept their herd in this high pasture most of the summer, and as a child I used to appear smeared and stained with the bilberries I’d picked along the path. And I’d help out with the animals; I’d try to milk the cows, and ride them, or maybe just chase them with a stick to frighten them, or so they’d frighten me. The fence and the cows are gone; the pasture is nothing but juniper and heather in flower, and the wild bees don’t come. No grass to graze on, sparkling green beneath the snow in patches.

The place has grown more rugged; it’s untouched, as it was in the beginning. Objectively, it has become markedly more beautiful. I, instead, am inert, lifeless. Uninvolved. I observe, without emotion. I suspect this has been pointless. (Why undertake a hike of two hours to see and hear, but not to feel?) The sky, so heavy and close, is a real threat. When at times the wind comes down, it really does carry the smell of the glacier (a vitreous odor, of caves and abysses), and in the intervals, the silence is utterly primeval. The cliff that plunges straight down a hundred paces away is desolate, merciless; it cuts off the world. And yet the pavor montium I feel is merely a sensation of cold,