All 6 Uses
dissolution
in
Absalom, Absalom!
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- She had lost some flesh of course, but it was as the butterfly itself enters dissolution by actually dissolving: the area of wing and body decreasing a little, the pattern of the spots drawing a little closer together, but with no wrinkle to show—the same smooth, almost girlish face on the pillow (though Miss Rosa now discovered that Ellen had been dyeing her hair evidently for years), the same almost plump soft (though now unringed) hands on the coverlet, and only the bafflement in the dark uncomprehending eyes to indicate anything of present life by which to postulate approaching death as she asked the seventeen-year-old sister (Henry up to now was just vanished, his birthright voluntarily†
Chpt 3dissolution = breaking something up or bringing it to an end
- Then Ellen died, the butterfly of a forgotten summer two years defunctive now—the substanceless shell, the shade impervious to any alteration or dissolution because of its very weightlessness: no body to be buried: just the shape, the recollection, translated on some peaceful afternoon without bell or catafalque into that cedar grove, to lie in powder-light paradox beneath the thousand pounds of marble monument which Sutpen (Colonel Sutpen now, since Sartoris had been deposed at the annual election of regimental officers the year before) brought in the regimental forage wagon from Charleston, South Carolina and set above the faint grassy depression which Judith told him was Ellen's grave.†
Chpt 4
- what vow, what promise, what rapt biding fire has the lilac rain of this wistaria, this heavy rose's dissolution, crowned?†
Chpt 5 *
- That's why although their deaths, the instant of dissolution, are of no importance to them since they have a courage and fortitude in the face of pain and annihilation which would make the most spartan man resemble a puling boy, yet to them their funerals and graves, the little puny affirmations of spurious immortality set above their slumber, are of incalculable importance.†
Chpt 6
- Rosa Coldfield says she had no childhood, but as if he had not been human born but instead created without agency of man or agony of woman and orphaned by no human being (your grandfather said you did not wonder what had become of the mother, you did not even care: death or elopement or marriage: who would not grow from one metamorphosis—dissolution or adultery—to the next carrying along with her all the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recogisable I, but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is, leaving nothing of what is behind but eliding complete and intact and unresistin†
Chpt 6
- vicious but not fatal horseplay or harmless coincidence, since Father said that even Sutpen probably knew that nobody yet ever invented a name that somebody didn't own now or hadn't owned once: and they rode up at last and Henry said, 'Father, this is Charles' and he—" ("the demon," Shreve said) " saw the face and knew that there are situations where coincidence is no more than the little child that rushes out onto a football field to take part in the game and the players run over and around the unscathed head and go on and shock together and in the fury of the struggle for the facts called gain or loss nobody even remembers the child nor saw who came and snatched it back from dissolution;†
Chpt 7
Definitions:
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(1)
(dissolution) the act or process of breaking something up or bringing it to an end—for example, ending a relationship or meeting, or a substance breaking apart as it mixes into a liquidIn everyday and legal use, dissolution can mean ending a relationship, meeting, or legal body, such as the dissolution of a marriage or a company.
In chemistry, it refers to a substance breaking apart and spreading evenly through a liquid (for example, salt in water), or a compound separating into its parts by chemical action. - (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)