by Unknown
“Whatever we achieve in this life is only worth it because it takes us one step closer to the Samith; it’s an attempt to feel it, to touch it. That’s the only way something can last after its disappearance or after death. That’s the only reason why nothing ever goes to waste. Without the Samith neither the perfect institutions, nor the Universal Commonwealth, nor the abundance and the amenities we enjoy would be of any value.”
Finally she told me that, without the quality that defines our love, we would have been deprived of the “magical knowledge” that we all share today. It’s the quality of it and not its intensity or the power of physical attraction that helped us deepen our relationships so much. And such a heart-to-heart-connection is something completely different from a fierce passion. She then added—if I understood and convey her words correctly—true love can be compared to a religious experience or intuition. So incredibly creative is its power!
She talked to me about many things, like other cultures and their strengths and capabilities, explaining to me that the greatest and highest values of inner culture do not differ from world to world; they’re one and the same no matter if one culture is intellectually and spiritually superior. The same divine spark still exists.
CHRONICLES FROM THE FUTURE
It was one o’clock in the morning when Silvia opened the book of poems and started reciting them to me. She went from Larsen to Goethe and from Schiller to Sulsnik, whose verses she remembered by heart:
Poets, don’t cry over your long-lost inspirations,
They had the most deserving fate.
They stayed pure, genuine and true,
Just as they were within your heart.
Without being betrayed by expression
Or externalisation,
Or being reduced by dressing them in human words…
Poets, don’t cry over your long-lost inspirations,
For nothing is lost within the Samith…
And then she resumed reading randomly. I remember one ancient poem about the wind and then a couple of Munsven’s poems in a row, which were written about three and a half hundred years ago in fluent French, a language quite rare to find in oral tradition in the poet’s era. Both were inspired by the Volkic preaching.
I still remember two verses from the first one:
Dechira le voile du Temps et fit preter
L’ Oreille les siecles étonnés du Passe
They talk about the Nibelvirch and about the “cry of ecstasy and awe” and with the word “étonnés” they want to emphasise how so much had been said and “predicted” by each one of all the different religions, theories and philosophies, but none had ever imagined that human expectations could go that far, that the longing of thousands of years and the hopes and desires of every human heart would eventually be justified!
From the second one I remember these verses:
De diverses lueurs fuyantes de la même
Realité suprême
Now, about Pradelli (3rd century of their chronology): I had been told that he wasn’t one of the top ones. Indeed his era was a time of recession in arts and creativity. For a long time his name and work had been forgotten but, in the beginning of their new era, the Nojere (their year 986 or our own 3382 AD), he was rather lucky since the people of that era were obsessed with searching among the old intellectuals for things they had “predicted without being aware of it”. And the main cause of that obsession was the fact that the “Great Revelation” they witnessed reminded them that past generations had many a time predicted and expressed—though faintly and vaguely—enough relevant things and clues whose importance and meaning their contemporaries could not and did not grasp.
The same can be observed in these verses of his that I heard tonight—the only ones that have survived:
Passai la mia vita qui piangendo
Da nostalgia di Qualche Cosa
Che on questo mondo non existe
They don’t owe their survival to their value, but to the fact that they were written 700 years before the Nibelvirch.
Silvia recited them all in one fell swoop, piously and with a voice full of joy and enthusiasm even though a Parisian wouldn’t be able to bear her pronunciation.
Who would have known, however, where all the old hopes and sorrows of those sensitive human beings were aimed? Who would have thought how timid all those expectations would prove compared to what “truly exists”?
I believe I have already mentioned that, nowadays, they are strongly convinced that the one and only, the root cause of the entire historical culture of the world, is the yearning for the Samith; this sacred thirst of the heart and soul, this “metaphysical pain”, as the past generations used to call it. Without its existence our life would be the same as that of an animal or a robot, they say.
From the purist Volkies, the most popular ones were not necessarily the greatest ones. Selius, from the era of the first Nibelvirches—or the period right after them—is a typical example: he became popular with his “verse-cry”, in which he beautifully caught the atmosphere of astonishment that prevailed in the midst of the “holy horror” and skilfully revived the cry of ecstasy that was heard before the miracle happened. “Samith efir! Samith ves gret efir!” It was the cry that was heard from the Valley and more specifically from the Aidersen Institute, followed by the torrent of the unrestrained Roisvirch that came to conquer human life. Sylvia knows all of these verses by heart. As she comes across the page, she recites it almost without looking at the text, while her moistened eyes prevent her from reading.
There it is! There’s the amazing flame,
that made everything sparkle!
You can finally see it from up here!
After a climb of centuries,
through countless tribulations,
we finally reached the top,
and we can see it from up here!
That’s what happened back then in the Valley—what is now considered as “the greatest event in human history”. It was followed by the unprecedented preaching: “Something exists, something so great that it’s impossible to grasp it with our human minds, something so great that the mere expectation of it will be enough to fill the world with endless happiness!”
Silvia continues to read. I’m sitting next to her and looking at her. The book jumps in her trembling hands. She’s trying to suppress her emotion. The last words she managed to utter, before she burst into tears, I think were of our own Lamartine:
Deux mille ans sont passés, je te cherche aujourd’hui.
Deux mille ans passeront et les enfants des hommes
S’agiteront encore dans la nuit où nous sommes.
It looked like her whole existence was protesting and crying out “no!”
Her voice, charged with emotion, faded while she read the last sentence. She mumbled the name of Volky and of the Valley and told me that if it hadn’t been for him, the pessimistic prophecy of the poet could have been verified. She wiped her eyes and stood up.
“It’s time to go, Andreas,” she told me.
GRETVIRCHAARSDAG
(At night)
Silvia and I were in the temple when, after midnight, Olaf Ledestrem directed one of the greatest parts of Ruthemir’s glorious Mass. Stefan and Hilda, who had arrived two days ago, were sitting next to us.
The first part of this magnificent work was played in the midst of complete silence, without the slightest sound being made from the 14,000 souls who were present!
I remember listening avidly and devoutly, feeling like I was hovering somewhere between the earth and sky, thinking to myself how helplessly impotent human hearing is to appreciate such a miracle and hoping it would never end!
At the same time, however, I was proud that I was born human and that one of my peers had managed to speak to God thus, in his own language. With eyes and mind in the stars, I was listening with devotion to the perfectly harmonious voices that, at that moment, in my heart, seemed identical with the harmonic laws that govern
the universe.
It was the first time I ever heard the glorious Mass and I truly felt it touched the purest and kindest side of me. I felt deep faith flooding my soul after listening to their own Bach of their 11th century. And I admit that they were right: he had surpassed our own...
The music was now over but no one from that sea of people moved from their seats for a long time. During those approximately ten minutes that passed, I wondered what they were waiting for. One could think that they had been petrified or that Ledestrem didn’t even deserve a single round of applause today… And those colours in the twilight...The women, all seven thousand of them, dressed in silk mantles, in different light colours, and the men dressed in black, wearing the traditional costumes of the Valley of the Roses. They even made us wear the short trousers with black, silk leggings that reach up to the knee. The women who had the standard for such circumstances strict, uniform hairstyle, looked like flowers of the same family, incredibly and equally beautiful! I realised that, inside the indoor auditorium, there were seven thousand different love stories!
In the end, I wondered whether Ruthemir’s Mass could still be heard up there, or rather if now there was a real, secret Mass going on instead under the moonlight that lit up the whole sky.
(Half an hour later)
When, after the concert, Silvia and I were alone, she pulled her favourite ring out of her things, the one with the green stone—one of the very few pieces of jewellery she possessed—and after she kissed it, she put it on my finger “to commemorate our joint prayer tonight”, as she said. She stood silent and looked still influenced by what she had heard. At that moment I happened to notice that on her left wrist she was wearing her one and only bracelet with the colourful gems. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds and amethysts, ten in total, were sparsely distributed and set in gold.
After a while I asked her, “When do you think fate decided our union?”
But she, despite her deep sentimentality, is still an educated, down-to-earth woman with critical and positive thinking.
“Do you think that destiny has nothing better to do than plan our union?” she replied smiling.
I didn’t want to continue the conversation. I have never said a word about my past, my other self. Nor does she know about Anna, of course. She knows nothing about her life, our life…
I asked Stefan if those who are not young and in love have no place in this big anniversary, the Bigvirchsdag, like we do. Plus I hadn’t seen any of the great Ilectors and the Lorffes either. He told me that this midnight found the whole humanity kneeling down. Everyone throughout the entire land was praying last night. But the Temple of the Idea had been reserved for these seven thousand couples and only them. The rest of the world prayed elsewhere and the Great Leaders had their own congregation in the Valley.
That is where the first successful Nibelvirch—Biglys and Storlys they call it in their language—took place, he said, five hundred and twenty-three years ago, at midnight. Volky was the first one who saw it and survived or rather who survived after seeing it. And after that came the redemption of human life. Such redemption could not have come unless humanity had gained consciousness and mastery over its existence.
(Very late at night)
The meeting with Stefan and Hilda before the concert—with a warm handshake and the girls kissing and hugging each other—gave me the opportunity to catch up on all the news of the past twenty days that we hadn’t seen them. Among other things, I was struck by Aria’s triumph in Norfor where her courses had sold out! You couldn’t even find standing room, let alone and empty seat even though bad rumours said that more seats were reserved by the admirers of her beauty than by the lovers of intellect.
Stefan had heard about all that from visitors of the North. He also told me that the top archaeologists and historians had paid tribute to her and that a great wise man —whose name escapes me— who had initially disagreed with her, recognised his mistake and actually admitted she was the one who was right. And that made her even more popular among the public. Aria told two of her friends in Norfor: “With great sorrow it was that he sent me the chain of rubies that he had possessed for four years, with great sorrow but also quite excited to get rid of it!”
Does her work have such significant value? I knew that she had a very unique personality, but from the little acquaintance I had with her, she hadn’t given me the impression of such great worth. Of course, she never talked about her work. She had never dropped the slightest hint about the colossal superiority of her work in relation to Stefan and his own poor engagement. I just found out from Hilda that her classmates at school used to make fun of her “love affairs with the Incas” and of her habit of writing her ideas down everywhere: on the margins of her books, on her desk, she even wrote on her lap once, so that she wouldn’t lose her inspiration!
It is said that, after her break-up with Eric, she is never escorted by the same person more than once, since there are many who would be glad to label anyone her fiancé. It seems that this kind habit of people not to intrude in other people’s personal lives only applies to mere mortals. And I praise God for making Andreas Northam one of them.
Anyway, this incident with Aria and my mistaken first impression of her made me sceptical about how many things I can truly perceive and understand around me. Today has been a hundred and thirty days and nights since I started my new life and I still wonder to what extent I have grasped any of the concepts, beliefs and habits of this new world. And, of course, quite a remarkable part of my life and attention revolves around Silvia…
I query whether I perceive everything I see around me in the right way and therefore, whether I capture it correctly…
At midday today I had a conversation with Stefan about the concert. He had the nicest things to say about the maestro, the orchestra and the choir that he had brought with him from Norfor. The soloists were the top of Blomsterfor, Norfor and New Göteborg. Now I only remember the name of the blue-eyed soprano Hilda Diran. I changed the subject to our own Beethoven, since the entire 9th was played at the concert last night, right after the second part of Ruthemir’s composition.
I finally got a chance to tell him what I had thought to myself a long time ago, but never had the courage to say to him: “We must have had some strange ‘barbarity’ in our time, for you to take our works of art and turn them into prayers…” I uttered, looking forward to his answer. Last night, despite his discretion, I noticed that he was watching me while the 9th Symphony was being played. When the drums entered and played their part and my eyes filled with tears, he firmly gripped my hand. I felt touched and proud throughout the whole time the 9th was being played, a feeling slightly different from the one I had during Ruthemir’s composition. It was something “mine” this time, something from home!
But Stefan didn’t seem at all shaken by my statement. From what I’ve heard, I take it that they consider Beethoven “one of them”, same as they considered Christ and Socrates “their brothers who were wandering in the darkness of prehistory”. He said that we understood very little of what they said and tried to convey through their work, and that they didn’t deserve to have been born in those times. Finally, he rhetorically asked how we managed to spare Beethoven’s life and didn’t poison him or crucify him too and then added that culture isn’t made by certain people and their work, but by the impact and appeal they have on those around them…
He also told me something very nice about the deafness of Beethoven: that today they liken him and his impairment to Prometheus, who was punished by the Gods because he stole fire. Just like Prometheus, he too was punished for having given this divine music to the primitive, immature and astonished humanity by being imprisoned in a soundless world!
For them, Beethoven and Ruthemir are precursors and evangelists and it is no coincidence that their works were played together.
Today the 9th is seen as some kind of a universal the national anthem that preaches love and loyalty to humanity and
its divine destiny. Indeed, they find that it is improper to listen to it sitting down...
MARKFOR (EX-ROME): THE MEGACITY
Visiting the Reigen Swage Palace
16 — XII
(At our villas at dawn)
I’m writing these few and hasty words in the dawning light: the news of last night made me very happy! Tonight we’re leaving for Markfor, where the four of us will be staying for the whole autumn, perhaps even for the winter! Regular, permanent residence in a big city with all its wonders! Walking the Roads of Jasmines! I'm extremely excited!
(Sunrise)
All night I was squirming in my armchair with impatience. I remember the very first time I visited Markfor with Stefan, late one night, about three months ago; it made me the same wonderful impression that Paris did the first time I saw it, with all its feverish joy and lights, and it revived in my sub-consciousness the memories and freshness of my youth! Stefan didn’t feel like sleeping that night so he came into my room and found me reading a history book. “Why on earth would you sit and read at such a divine hour?” he told me and pulled me towards the window to show me the magical starlight…
And so began the journey, if it can even be called a journey. It was rather a dip into infinity, so silent and quick that I didn’t even realise it! It only lasted four minutes and it felt like we were in a vacuum!
Lombardy spread beneath our feet, the Lombardy of today, that is, this massive, vastly populated city-country inhabited by millions of Scandinavians, or rather, their dark-haired great grandchildren, which, however, has kept the same ancient name. It looked like a gigantic human beehive that stretched into infinity! Imagine that the entire plain, from Gallarate and onwards, is now an immense settlement that stretches continuously as far as the eye can see!