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

“Our conscience and our innate moral compass complement the gap of those abolished institutions very efficiently and so, every partnership and cohabitation is based on and defined by pride and honour. Whether a great disappointment, a new love or unbridgeable differences in beliefs and characters can sever the bond is irrelevant. Besides,” he concluded, “didn’t the same thing happen in your time, regardless of legal limitations?” I had nothing to say.

I then asked him what happened the first night that the partners become Cives-citizens. That must be the night when they totally go wild, I figured, and reasonably, after so much restraint. I was wrong.

“That is indeed what used to happen… Several hundred years ago, though. Physical attraction still played the most important role and that night was seen as the call of nature for the young. But it’s been a long, long time since then. Things have changed. I’m not saying that nobody makes love that night, but those who do are mostly the couples who met during their service and decided to consummate their love on their first day as citizens. The vast majority, however, doesn’t. Some wait months, even years, until they find a suitable mate, long after they burn their white stole, the symbol of their purity, on their night when their service ends.”

Stefan stared into space as if pondering the past.

“I, too, had a night like this, you know…” he said. “Such a thrill! On the one hand the whole world is opening in front of you that night, and on the other, you finally become entitled to the magical sense of love-making. Unforgettable years…”

His eyes filled with tears. I was startled. He continued, obviously moved. “Even that song that we sing that night means a great deal to me… to us... All the inhabitants of the earth have been singing it for over thirteen hundred years. We all learn it at school, boys and girls. I know that it hasn’t got great lyrics but still, have you got any idea how that simple and somewhat flat old melody echoes in our ears, in our souls? Have you paid attention to the lyrics? “In the light of your nineteen years, the swallows come and the flower buds opened early”. Or the other one; “Life’s a rosy dream that now begins. Sing it.”

He was now speaking with utmost enthusiasm. I didn’t interrupt him of course. “A relatively few generations after yours, after the puritanical movements began to disappear and Flessing and Kirchof found the remedy for your terrible illness, the nightmare ended and things started to change in the way in which parents spoke to their children about love and sex. There was no longer need to speak to them about risks and precautions. Instead, they spoke to them about the anticipation of a great happiness which, if they were patient enough to wait for the right time and the right person, would be theirs to enjoy—in moderation—for the rest of their lives.

As the generations passed, the idea that this level-headed, ethical and unmarred happiness is better to come after the fulfilment of duty, became part of their social awareness. That was after the service had been considerably reduced. That’s when they started giving the white stoles to the adolescents. In fact, they were told: ‘No one will force you to fulfil your two-year service in the glothners. If you refuse there is no penalty. Just consider that the Universal Commonwealth needs you.’”

And indeed, as Stefan told me, no one left. And that way they corrected the injustice of our time that associated the “fulfilment of duty” with retirement, which came at an age when happiness could not be bought with the finest gold.

They considered the age of fifteen as the key stage in one’s life. They believed that it was then when the new horizons in human esoterism are opened. It was then when everything changed in the eyes of a person since, from that point on, the soul took over and saw things differently. In fact, he told me that “the eyes start to well up more easily”.

I told him that if they think the same didn’t happen in our time as well, they were very much mistaken. He answered me that he was referring to the rule and not the exception: “The exceptions don’t define an era… the rule does.”

“Yes, but you just told me that the limitations helped in our time because otherwise the situation got out of hand and reached the point of promiscuity. You said it yourself that we needed restrictions since we were ‘practically uncivilised’.”