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

comments on everything from Marx, Hegel, and Freud to Herbert Marcuse, Charles Reich, and Alvin Toffler. He often wrote extensive précis and notes in the margins of the books he read.

3 high prelates: Linda Terziroli, Un Pacchetto di Gauloises: Biografia di Guido Morselli (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2019), 218

4 he was a convinced believer: See, among others, Valentina Fortichiari, Invito alla lettura di Morselli, Mursia, 1984, and her Introduction and Chronology to Guido Morselli, Romanzi Volume I, eds. Elena Borsa and Sara D’Arienzo (Milan: Adelphi, 2002)

5 beginning with Hegel: Diario, December 7, 1966, commenting on a photograph of the earth (taken from Lunar Orbiter in August 1966.) The photograph, from Corriere della Sera, was preserved inside Morselli’s Italian edition of The Exploration of Space by Arthur C. Clarke.

6 fight between two nurses in the violent mental asylum: The novel touches, sometimes in an offhand way, on events that were to mark the early 1970s for Italians, and not only Italians. These were years of airplane hijackings by Palestinians and Black Panthers, of radical groups both left and right involved in European and Italian terrorism, of the publication in 1972 of the Club of Rome’s influential The Limits to Growth, and in the early 1970s the first experiments with Franco Basaglia’s eventual 1978 reform abolishing insane asylums in Italy. (Tellingly, Karpinsky is killed in an asylum fight between nurses.)

7 distinct desire for androgyny: Among his papers at his death were extensive notes toward a novel, Uonna (uomo + donna, man and woman in one) in which he intended to develop his idea of an androgynous future person.

DISSIPATIO H.G.

8 Chrysopolis: The oddly named capital of Morselli’s tale is a wealthy city devoted to finance. The city is never identified beyond doubt, nor is the country it’s located in. The historical Chrysopolis (modern Üsküdar, in Turkey), was an ancient settlement on the Bosphorus whose name meant Golden City, possibly because it had once been a gold deposit where the Persians stored their tribute. It was founded in the seventh century BC by Greek colonists from Megara in western Attica, just a few decades before the founding of Byzantium on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus. The decisive battle between the Western Roman emperor Constantine and Licinius, the Eastern emperor, took place in AD 324 at Chrysopolis. After Byzantium was chosen as Constantine’s capital, Chrysopolis would become a suburb of Constantinople.

9 antitype: In the Bible, a New Testament event or figure foreshadowed by an Old Testament equivalent. Jonah, who emerges alive from the stomach of the whale after three days, is the type on which the antitype of the resurrected Christ depends.

10 caput mundi: capital of the world

11 everything’s already been said . . . : In French in the Italian text: toutes choses sont déjà dites, mais comme personne n’écoute il faut toujours recommencer.

12 In the Marcusian sense: In 1967 Morselli read Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man.

13 nictalope: in Italian, having better than average night vision, while in English the nyctalope suffers from night blindness.

14 At a quarter past midnight: Note that there is a time shift backward between the moment he arrives at the well and the moment, seated on the ledge, that he contemplates letting himself fall into the water below. This is unlikely to be an error; it may instead be the author’s way of sending time’s arrow in reverse to facilitate the inexplicable.

15 qualunquista: Italian term used during the Fascist era to mean politically apathetic, someone who “doesn’t give a damn” about ideological consistency. démobilisateur: French, demotivator, discourager.

16 Alceste le Misanthrope: The dislikable title character of Moliere’s comedy The Misanthrope.

17 in Hudson Bay: Referring to Greenland, Morselli writes of Hudson Bay, but the relevant body of water is Baffin Bay.

18 Bronisław Malinowski: The Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s 1929 ethnography of the Trobriand islanders studied reciprocity and exchange. His masterwork was Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922.

19 Lévy-Bruhl: Morselli read Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality in 1963.

20 consensus opinantium: a consensus of those with opinions, a play on consensus sapientium, “consensus of the wise”

21 Scire nefas: From Horace’s Ode 1.11 “Tu ne quaesieris”: Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi / finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios (“Ask not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years, / Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers”). English translation, John Conington, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (Bell and Daldy, 1872).

22 Contraria per contraria expiantur: roughly, “opposites atone for opposites.”

23 psychoanalysis: Morselli uses the abbreviation P.A. here and on page 52. He was apparently fascinated by psychoanalysis but it remains unclear whether he ever tried it; see Morselli, Diario, Adelphi, 2014, n. 251.

24 Kosmos olos en tòo poneròo keitai: και ο κόσμος όλος εν τω πονηρώ κείται, from the Bible, 1 John 5:19 in the Modern English Version.

25 Native gods are calling: From “Pagan Love Song,” from the 1929 film The Pagan. The actual lyrics are “Native hills are calling / To them we belong.”

26 itinerarium mentis in Mortem (“The mind’s journey to death”): Plays on St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind to God), 1259.

27 Aidez-moi!: Charles De Gaulle made a famous appeal on French television on April 23, 1961, (“Françaises, Français, aidez-moi!”) after French generals in Algeria, opposed to independence, staged a putsch.

28 large circle of shade: From Dante Alighieri, Rime petrose: Al pocogiorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra / son giunto, lasso!, ed al bianchir de’ colli. (“To the dim light and the large circle of shade / I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills.”) English translation, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni,” ca. 1848.

29 total military mobilization: “Military analogies come to mind. Tourism is a parody of total mobilization,” writes Hans Magnus Enzensberger in “A Theory of Tourism,” tr. Gerd Gemünden and Kenn Johnson, 1958. Morselli recorded this in his diary in 1973.

30 Iamblichus: Iamblichus of Chalcis (AD ca. 245–ca. 325) was a pagan Neoplatonist philosopher who wrote an influential biography of Pythagoras and whose writings helped transmit Platonic ideas in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The attribution of a text called Dissipatio Humani