Monday 20 March 2023
To make nothing out of something
So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word "dissipate"--to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Babylon Revisited (1931)
There's a lot of it going on in the modern world, making nothing out of something. It’s what convinced Malthusians do, but they don't dissipate their own something. Their focus is always something belonging to social classes below their own, classes they think should have more nothing and less something.
Malthusians dissipate what isn’t theirs. Energy is the big one, but there are many others and even some intangibles such as democracy, knowledge, science, freedom, Brexit. They are particularly keen to dissipate your vote, to make nothing out of something.
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4 comments:
Is that dissipate or annihilate?
Anon - annihilate could be closer.
That's a very nice idea by Fitzgerald. I'm reading "Tender is the Night" at the moment, and it's something of a motif there as well. I think the dissipation of desire is pretty well catered for in our society. Whether they have planned to do so, they are now working on fear and anger. Encouraging people to generate huge amounts of anxiety and indignation, and then discharging it over nonsensical issues.
Sam - I find him very quotable and yes, dissipation is one of his themes. It tends to be associated with personal dissipation via booze and so on, but it's more than that.
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