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

During the past few days the weather has been reminding me of home and loneliness keeps flooding my world and my eyes. If I find students to tutor, I will accept them all even if I am underpaid, with the hope of finally meeting someone whom I can actually trust and with whom I can communicate. Hilda, Stefan, Silvia, where are you?

This evening I sat down opposite the Parthenon—on the northern side—and was lost in thought for hours, my gaze caressed by the inscriptions carved into the rock. Suddenly, soft, approaching footsteps interrupted my daydreaming. I raised my head. It was a tall, seemingly cultivated young man. He apologised in French. I introduced myself and he shook my hand, expressing his joy about me not being Prussian. That’s all he understood from my accent.

“I understand… I understand you very well,” he told me. “When you concentrate your thought entirely on this rock, without allowing your mind to think about anything else, it’s as if you’re living in that era, two thousand years ago. What more could a person have seen back then, if bent over this spot for a couple of minutes? For those minutes, this rock would have been their world.”

I was carried away and answered him, “And after the same number of years it will still be the same. This land has strong and solid foundations. So many things will have happened in the meantime, so much will have changed by then, and yet this piece of rock will remain exactly the same. This is the incredible thing! So, staring at it, and forgetting everything else around us, isn’t it like we’re living in the future for a moment?

He turned around and looked deeply into my eyes. I fell silent.

“Except,” I said after a minute, as if suddenly remembering something, “except then, there would be no bars around it. They would have done away with them.”

He looked at me with a strange expression on his face, a questioning gaze. He seemed a bit offended, not by what I had said, but more by the simple and confident tone of my voice.

“I should go now,” he said right after, “the doors close at sunset.”

THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS SICKNESSMarch 20th, 1923

Here we go again. The slight breathlessness and the small but gradual rise of fever every night have returned with the same hostile intentions, with the same malevolent persistence, hints of small and insidious cracks inside me. The end is near; I must deal with it now. The need to unburden my soul grows more imperative by the second. At an age when other people feel young and plan ahead, I am dying with a mercilessly intolerable moral onus inside me.

Everyone in my hometown knows that the physicians were wrong to believe that the disease that tormented me for fourteen days back in 1917 would not come back to torture me again. It returned once more, not for a couple of weeks like before, but for approximately twelve months. They remember rushing me to Zurich in mid-May 1921 and me looking like a dead man. Everybody there knows it. What they don’t know, however, is that the first time I recovered I didn’t remember anything from the time of my illness: for me it was as if I had lost touch with myself and the world just for a second, not for two weeks. On the contrary, the second time I opened my eyes, I was filled with fresh, crystal clear memories of a real 360-day life, so recent and so vivid in my mind!

You can give whichever explanation suits you best—medical, scientific or whatever else—and I will accept them all. Just do not tell me it was a dream or a figment of my imagination because you will never have been more mistaken! There are things that the human mind does not know or comprehend. Only if someone put themselves in my shoes could they ever feel my absolute certainty. God be my witness, and I say God because he and he alone can see into the depths of my soul. And he knows how much I respect and cherish his name.

Listen to me, the truth cannot be concealed. The signs are innumerable: first and foremost the passing of time. When one has lived a certain reality for a certain amount of time, when one has seen and touched all these tangible things and their embossed details, it’s very difficult to assert that it was all a dream and not an actual part of one’s real life. The same applies to my experience. It has now been months since I re-found myself and the logical thing would be for these “memories” to have blurred or faded away. Well, I assure you that, never, throughout this period, have I doubted my firm conviction that all these things that happened to me were incidents of actual live experience and that I spent 360 days of real life in the distant future! March 21st, 1923