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

I am not feeling better. I think my condition has been exacerbated by the surprising temperature drop over the past few days. This cough, which in the beginning I thought would pass, continues to rack my lungs. I didn’t like the look on the physician’s face yesterday. But what else is there to tell me? If I am to die, so be it. After what I’ve experienced what else remains for me to see? For as much life I’ve got left, that will be my prayer and that is what my soul will await. April 1923

I remembered the myth of the white-haired hermit: back when he was young, his beloved took him out of the monastery after many years, and made him spend some time with her. Before she left, she put her emerald ring on the middle finger of his right hand. The hermit woke up again in this life among the shrubs where he had lain down, believing he had been dreaming and that everything he remembered—the golden lampposts, the thick carpets he was walking on, her sweet kiss—was part of that dream. But after looking at his hand, he shuddered; the ring was there. The other hermits later confirmed it.

I’m sitting here, staring at my empty hands and I wonder: Why can’t reality, no matter how distant in time, leave behind the slightest tangible sign, when a dream once could? But these things only happen in myths and legends. If, however, I could choose what tangible sign I’d like to find on me last May, surrounded by the physicians of Zurich, it would be neither her emerald ring nor her picture nor any other of her precious little presents. You can make all the assumptions you want about me, but what I’d really wish to find would be my original manuscript that I wrote when I lived in the future.

That’s what’s been constantly befuddling my mind. What happened to that diary? It took me a great amount of time—almost a year—and many sleepless nights to finish it. With true joy and genuine passion I put down on paper every single detail of what I had experienced during each day in the future. The memory of Andreas Northam, whose body I lived in, and of my manuscripts, “The Diary”, which I left behind, burns a hole in my heart.

No, no! I must at all costs dismiss these disturbing thoughts from my mind: the belief that nothing is truly irreversible in this universe and that we have no right to measure everything with the finite capabilities of our human mind. And after all, what do I have to worry about? One day, in a couple of thousand years’ time, Andreas Northam will write these pages himself!

My judgment is still clear enough to point out to me that these mistaken ideas are pushing me towards idleness and submission to my fate, my doom drawing closer by the second. But I won’t fall into the trap. My heart might be ailing and challenged and pained but, thank God, my brain is still strong and working properly. You, my Lord, chose a humble, unimportant man, a man that suffered and is still suffering from a severe illness, to show him a small shred of your eternal secrets. It is you who decides what needs to be done on every occasion; I know it, I believe it. So please, give me the strength to finish what I started and relieve my burdened heart. Let the paper become my confessor and my saviour! Tuesday, April 24th

A while ago, my landlady, an amazing woman, knocked on my door to see if I needed anything and make sure everything was all right. Well, you won’t believe it, but I felt this sudden urge to take her in my arms and deliver to her the great news: that now I most certainly can write everything down! Because once again, I was given the chance to verify how excellent my memory skills are. After all the hardships and the suffering, it’s still here! I managed to put down on paper, word for word, complete stanzas of poems that I had never read or heard in my life before Silvia recited them to me that unforgettable night under the stars.

So what can possibly keep me from re-writing my lost pages, my memories from the future? I can definitely do it now! Any doubt I might have from here on will merely be an unsound hesitation that I will have to fight against.

I don’t mind this cough tearing my insides apart or this fever burning this obnoxious carcass of a body. All this is not sufficient to cast a shadow over the excitement that the prospect of completing my work gives me! Time might be limited—perhaps only a few months—but this will be my “future” from now on; and it will be the joyful re-writing of the manuscripts that were once ready but left behind. The same fate that doomed me has given me, now, in the end, this unique chance and I’m convinced that I can remember it all, page for page, if not word for word.

I stayed up late tonight and savoured my newfound happiness. I’m ecstatic! Nothing will be lost; from now on my short life will be empty no longer. I have a new reason to live!