Godfrey > Recent Status Updates

The centrality of faith and personality to the French Revolution.

The neglect of Catholicism.
The insurgency and political separatism of Huguenot Protestantism.
The State's identification with Catholicism.
Bankruptcy.

The society savage gives way to the uncivilised savage, redeemed for being less bizarre and falsely mannered.

End of chapter 3, hallucinatory haunting synchronised to my own sleep-induced neurosis

Development of romanticism from naive, heroic to stoic, self-expressive

Resigned hedonism, cynical idealist, committed nonchalance

Familial stories interweave each generation's, time passing dynastically.

Decline undermined and outmanouvered by self-inflicted purgatory to purge Casanova of those experiences which he is no longer able to consummately fulfill.

Transformation from seducer to lecherer through the psychologically testing game presented by as and by Marie Charpillon, first as a woman to love for the understimulated Casanova, for who sex remains the ultimate triumph but one which is not victorious or final, second as a proud, resistant daughter tired of the sexual favours she is forced to pay by her perenially bankrupt and itinerant family.

I dreamt longer than I lived
Replacing wakers with slept memories
Until dream copied dream
And night was sleep's elegy

A libertine in limbo, leading a deep revolution in the recesses of his mind, sexually ambivalent but for the libido of his dreams. The inversion of cause and effect between life and dreams, one as the reflection of the other; the dream becomes paramount, the equation the same. Waking becomes first the reprisal, then the rehearsal of the dreams.

The erotic, the disappeared and reappeared, the pubescent, the masked, the haunted, the night, the dead, the dying, the grieving, the ranked, the superior, the tortured, the sacrificed, the sacred and the profane.

Being who he is not (old age, identity tricks to have Marcolina), who he was never (literate lumière), and reputation over man (not handsome but infamous, winning the middle-aged), force Casanova into self-estrangement. Marcolina, his Madame de Stäel, is a symbolic redemption; a replica of Voltaire's mistress... everything appears arranged around becoming/dismissing/imitating Voltaire. The literate is the sexual.