Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

All sorts of images swirled through my head. The face of this great city has been completely changed these days. You bump into thousands of foreign pilgrims, who have travelled from all different parts of the world, everywhere on the streets and massive motorways. They’ve come for the big procession scheduled for the day after tomorrow. They seem to be very comfortable in the slaabroks, the mandatory uniforms that I described above, which they only take off when they go to sleep in the luxury hostels, the gestalads and the civesheims

located on the surrounding hillsides.

These days the Valley is full of Tilteys, Ilectors and Lorffes

, as well as representatives of the clergy. They walk around the city just like everyone else, simple and modest, making people feel equal. I’ve never seen so many of them gathered in one place, but I’ve also never seen such a lack of interest from the people around them. It seems that the concentration, the devotion and the reverential mood of each visitor leaves no room for acclamation. Or better that their common worship for the Nibelvirch is so dominant in their hearts that it leaves no room for any other sort of enthusiasm.

In fact, even the outfits of these great men do not differ much from those of the ordinary Cives. The only thing that changes is the colour of the socks, the stole and the belt. And yet the final visual effect is not at all monotonous since their insignia complete the outfit—golden chains with emeralds, pearl cumberbunds—lending a very quaint and charming tone to the boulevards, mainly at night-time.

Stefan tells me that this year’s participation is unprecedented, and yet it seems that all these crowds were housed adequately and efficiently in no time in the endless urban extension built on the surrounding hills. In fact, he tells me that there’s still more space in the larinters

, the hostels and the apartments. They have a long tradition in organisational capabilities and, once again, they’ve done a wonderful job.

At 5:30 in the afternoon, John Humphrey and Ulfink Enemark in the flesh, walked by, a few meters away from where we were standing. Stefan pointed them out to me. I barely noticed the famous creator of Fabiola and the poet of “Dream on the Riverside”, “Forgotten Promise” and “Irenaeus”. My eyes were fixed on the statues. I’m less interested in real people. The same goes for the priestesses. We encountered several of them, some older, other younger, dressed in the typical snow white robe. As I have read, the patrons and protectors of their faith are the Lorffes themselves even though, in practice, they rarely take part in the rituals. The greatest of them possess the undisputed social primacy in contemporary life. Even nowadays, history seems to repeat itself in many ways. For example, the current social ranking resembles that of the Egypt of the Pharaohs, but without the violence and the flaunting of power.

THE PANTHEON

I noticed that the current language is richer than ours. Here’s an example: while they’ve always had separate words for “prophet” and “poet”, since after the time of Volky, they also have a third word that means both. The same happens with the words “priest”, “thinker” and “philosopher”; they now have a word that expresses all three.

I knew that in the Pantheon I would find thousands of works by all the great spiritual men that have existed from my time and onwards. But the area of the Pantheon is extremely large; it’s an entire town in itself. I only spent a few hours there when it would take years for someone to study this entire cultural and spiritual heritage. One can find the names hosted there in school textbooks and read about their work. The guidebooks of the Valley are there to help you find content by a specific author or the exact shelf location of a specific book in that vast library. Poets, philosophers, researchers of the natural sciences, music composers, thinkers, humanitarians, public and political figures, mystics, artists, social reformers, educators: they’re all here, as long as their work has stood the test of time. Einstein, Newton, Pythagoras, Homer, Milton, Virgil, Socrates, Plato, Confucius, William Tell, Gautama Buddha, Matteotti, Bach, Handel, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Seneca, Pascal, Bergson and Rilke are some of the historical figures from the eras before mine that are hosted there.

Their life-size marble, brass, copper and synthetic ivory statues, most of them decorated with scenes from their work, that stand on equally tall pedestals, symbolise, at least in my own mind, a triumphant vindication of the cultural legacy of the “prehistoric and uncivilised”, as they call them, times. It gave me considerable pleasure and satisfaction to see some of our great men come alive everywhere around me! Something that really struck me was that I even saw crowned ones, like Codrus, Numa Pompilius and Marcus Aurelius!