by Unknown
Another building that fascinated me was the Church of Alma, which is both the palace and the temple of the spirit at the same time. Built in Gothic style, it is mainly famous for the sculptures on its facade. Its construction began in the 9th century by the famous architect Rauschen Torneo, but finished later on because its creator passed away before he completed it. Two hundred meters away is the garden where the great-grandfathers of the present generation had managed to store centuries-old rocks from the pedestal of the ancient statue of Castello Sforzesco, in a rectangular railing with an uninscribed plaque.
Markfor is a state that can be loved dearly since it combines the old with the new times. If you are an art lover, Markfor will welcome you through its three major museums: the Luigi Davide, the Titiano and the Goya, and then the Nibrera and countless other, smaller ones, among which the famous special Tenarelis museum/glyptotheque. If you want to study any field, you won’t find a better place to do it. You can choose from simple lectures to large universities attended by the Cives and even academies of philosophy and the fine arts.
As far as libraries are concerned, the four largest ones are open, each one dedicated to a different field: the Aidersian is for literature, the Cartesian for philosophy, the Alexandrian for history and the Laurentian for the history of art. And of course, they also have the famous symphonic orchestras of Markfor, where you can listen to all kinds of music; from ecclesiastical music to the masterpieces of Valmandel, Svelder, Holger Nielsen, Ruthemir and so many others...
If you are a sports fan, Markfor has no wrestling rings and fields and courts for matches to offer because they now detest our sports and all sorts of records, but it has abundant physical exercise centres and swimming pools where, however, no record is ever pursued and no competition is ever held.
If you happen to be sad, a walk through the streets of the city will suffice to make you feel better. And if you still have the heart of a child, then Markfor, the favourite “wildflower”, the state with the bright smile, will welcome you with sunbeams streaming through the chestnut trees of the Parco Centrale and its gardens will embrace you!
The way the people face the world and see their peers here is very different from ours. So are the rules of socialising with each other. If you walk down the street no one will bother you. If you’re standing still, staring at the ponds in one of the large parks, they will leave you in your thoughts. Never has it happened for someone to speak to me when I’m alone in such circumstances.
It is, however, a completely different case if you enter one of the games centres, sports stadiums, pools, or larinters, as they call them. I remember what happened to me one morning, about five months ago, one of the first days that I went and listened to Lain. Early in the morning, before the lecture, I went past a great stadium that seemed to have a vast array of facilities for table tennis and I entered, curious to see up close all the tables lined up. I walked around and, naturally, every once in a while I stopped and stared. But I seemed to have forgotten what Stefan had told me a million times, that is, that “here there are no strangers”, until I realised on my own that in such circumstances they don’t leave you in peace. Therefore, after a while, two girls and a young man in his thirties who was accompanying them—all three strangers to me—came towards me and asked me if I wanted to play with them. I replied as politely as I could and finishing my sentence with the necessary “tank”(their word for “thank you”) that today I was in a hurry, adding that “perhaps another morning I could have the pleasure of doing so”. I didn’t know what else to say. You shouldn’t tell your name here, nor do people ask it or tell you theirs. Nevertheless, they might have been strangers to me but to them I was their old, anonymous comrade at the glothners, a person worthy of interacting with, a partner, even a friend!
In such conditions of social life, who could ever feel lonely here? The feeling that I had so many a time experienced in my previous life, the melancholy of loneliness, was unknown here!
THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE “BIG DAY” AND THE EXTINCTION OF THE RACES
Yesterday afternoon I took the veloscooter for a ride for the second time. The evening view of Markfor is completely different from the morning one. This time there were thousands of people on the streets and there was plenty of light everywhere. As I heard, all these people had just returned from the Valley, where they had travelled yesterday for the big day, the anniversary of 1510 years since the day of the union, the day when a true state with law and order replaced the political and economic anarchy of the past. I also overheard some young people on the street singing something that reminded me of the words children in ancient Sparta used to say to the elders:“άμμες δε γ’ εσσόμεθα πολλώ κάρρονες”, which means “but we shall become much better than you”.
Dear Lord, please help those
Who come tomorrow
Be better than us today
And make them worthier
For the sake
Of the greatness
And the glory
Of our beloved Earth!
The torchlight procession that took place ended in front of the towering statue of John Terring, in the middle of the square, as is the case on this night every year.
Behind that square begins one of the largest main arteries of eastern Markfor. I’m almost home. The skyline of Markfor, embellished with thousands of100-storey skyscrapers on both sides, seems endless and incredible. And everywhere around them: huge, beautiful gardens.
Passing by here, I feel young and happy too, I feel like one of them. And lately this feeling is very frequent. It seems as if this gap of mine in education and tradition has magically been filled tonight, as if I have assimilated their experiences and made them my own.
Late last night, at the cheerful dinner table of the Cives from Riyalta, on the immense rooftop of one of the skyscrapers enclosed with crystal fences the ancestral memories of the common meals of the early Eldere came alive. The celebration of the great day ended with a few touching words, tear-filled eyes and recollections of the glorious personages of their history.
Dinner lasted one and a half hours in a very cordial atmosphere. And for the first time ever, I saw these people, who detest alcohol, drink a tiny bit of wine, especially the ruby-red, sweet wine, served after the meal together with fruit, their famous Lacrimae Rosae, produced by the Grimbole collective. When dinner was over, everyone stood up and observed a few moments of silence for the great day. Needless to say, I did the same. In the end and after the countless wishes for the years and generations to come, they stood up again and began to whisper an ancient hymn, fortunately sotto voce, so I could pretend with dignity that I was whispering along…
No meanness nor gloating, no insidiousness nor scheming, no selfishness, no deadly wars, no back-stabbing in social life, nor all those incidents of pointless wickedness. How unhappy we were back then! We spoke of humanism then and they have finally made it come true!
Of course, their historians and educators seem to forget that it was out of necessity that those years were so dreadful and that we couldn’t have done anything to prevent it. Not that we didn’t want to; we just couldn’t…
There are times when I want to tell Lain and Stefan, who so honour the founders and organisers of the Eldere, that when they address the “great” politicians and “defenders of humanism” it would be more correct and befitting to ask them: “What happened to the coloured races?” “At what cost did you achieve the prevalence of humanism among the white and the establishment of your beloved law and order?”
History is now written and read from their perspective because they were fortunate enough to prevail. But history would have been written in a completely different way and their atrocities would have been condemned in the strongest possible terms had the yellow race inherited the earth… They now write history as if it were a morally flawless triumph, a pure heroic path, an exaltation of the soul, a historical perspective possibly very similar to the one taught in the
seminaries of the church by a group of Spanish sages in the 18th century: the triumph of the invasion and destruction of the obsolete cultures such as the Incas and the Mayans...
“What happened to the ancient civilisations of Asia, you hypocrites?”That’s what I should ask them! On the Reigen-Swage I saw that only until the mid-24th century of our own chronology were there still some “yellow pockets” scattered here and therein the vast territory of Asia, which is now inhabited by the French, Anglo-Saxons, Slavs and Latinos. I also saw that at the same time on the “black continent” it was tremendously rare for one to encounter any blacks.
Fate was very cruel to these races and quite ironic as well, because while they had just ceased to be slaves and were emancipated politically in autonomous territories, the brutal attitude of their “old colonial oppressor”, who had meanwhile panicked by the “nightmare of the number,” returned to haunt them for another 150 years. The earth must have witnessed horrid atrocities of inhumanity after the 21st century, which lasted for hundreds of years. Ultimately, the black and yellow races, as well as all other races of Asia, paid the price with the termination of their own history on earth.
AIDERSEN RIVALRIES AND THE ATTEMPTS AGAINST THE NEW REALITY
Gled and Olsen Institute and Lesley Gate
13-VI
(Very late at night)
I had already heard a lot from Lain about the crisis that the Volkic preaching had undergone for decades towards the end of the first millennium of their new chronology, before it triumphantly prevailed later on. And such a crisis was anticipated since the Nibelvirch was never a given to the wider public in any of the eras that have ensued since its appearance. Nowadays, however, the Valley says that it is much more tangible and accessible to the people—even outside the circles of the Ilectors—than it was in the past.
I didn’t go to the Reigen-Swage Institute today. I haven’t been there for eight days. I stayed at home all day. Wanting to rest my eyes for a bit, I ordered books that are specially designed and printed to be heard instead of read! I put one of them in the special device that came with it and heard a short, popularised, historical narration of those years, from 987 until 1030 (3376-3419 AD). What is most difficult for me to understand are the many technical terms of the peculiar old language of their most ancient texts, terms that have been preserved and are still used even in the simplest and shortest books of today, because they claim that the youth of today know them and understand their meaning. In any case, I write down whatever I’ve understood and in the way I’ve understood it, trying to convey these new terms and concepts in the language of our time, and deliver them the way we would. I honestly don’t know what’s harder: trying to assimilate them or transcribing them using the lexical formulas of our own, old way of expression? Anyway...
One would expect that the main subject of controversy in the Valley of the Roses would be Volky himself, since, based on our own saying, “No man is a prophet in his own land”. But quite the opposite happened.
In the Valley he was worshiped and deified. Instead, the biggest reactions came from the major intellectual centres of Gled, Ossen, Vikingegnist and the Skolkin Institute. They mostly attacked his fans and students and the biggest names of the Aidersen, that is, the first ones to write about the “Great Revelation”, having previously lived the Nibelvirch themselves, for Volky didn’t write anything himself after the year 986 and for the last ten years of his life, as was the case for Jesus, Buddha and Socrates.
The Gled and Ossen Institutes in particular, fought against the Umoddelbare Oplysning (Direct Knowledge and Instant Enlightenment) and highlighted the dangers of any road to the perception of reality that exists outside the framework of capabilities of the human cognition. Ratziskin of Ossen believed that the senses were imperfect, but the human mind was a mirabilis organum that substituted their imperfection and remedied the wrong sensory data transmitted to the brain. “Everything that actually exists,” he said, “can be reduced to cognition. Nihil in mundo, nisi in intellectu. Anything that does not comply with intellect and reason does not exist. Or better: it is impossible to be sure of its existence.”
It was impossible for the Gled and Ossen, especially during the first few decades, to admit the “new intellectual abilities” of the man of Rosernes Dal, the new knowledge and capacities and the supernatural experience of the Aidersen (overforstandige empiria). What the Aidersen argued was for them unacceptable: namely that man had acquired a new “instrument of knowledge” that on the one hand gives us findings so palpable and data so positive that would satisfy even the most conservative early believers in sensory data, and on the other hand proves that its texture is “beyond cognition” and “beyond reason” (ratio).
Two scientists, Milliakof and Durant, took advantage of the “confession” of the Aidersen, namely that it was possible that the original, remote ancestor of the “new antenna” of the Nibelvirch, had been the “intuition” of the old times and distorting that confession by omitting the part that the first Volkists added to that idea—that nevertheless that intuition was denatured into something completely different—they stressed with all the power and authority that the Ossen gave them, how precarious and dangerous this road that leads to mystical flights of fancy was.
Milliakof did not live to see the utter defeat of his rationale and the triumph of the Volkists. In the mid-11th century, the Nibelvirch was at its peak and, led by the first major Aidersians, the Valley of the Roses had become part of the intellectual vanguard of the human race and was making history!
Another attempt against the new preaching was made by some circles of physicians—though with limited impact—about a thousand years ago, which tried to find weak spots in Volky’s psyche and say that “he was the first victim of a mass delusion, which has persisted through time.” The leading role in that “movement” was held by the Lesley Gate Institute, with its world-famous medical school, followed by five or six other groups of wise men from all over the world, and the whole debate lasted for about a decade.
What was their theory? More or less the following: “Make no mistake; everything that you now feel comes from within. All these wonderful things you want to say are nothing but a vivid reflection of your own ideas. Their source is not external; they derive from your own depths. So come to your senses and realise that you are walking the tightrope between sanity and illusion!
The Gate of Lesley said, of course, a lot more than that against not only the Greats of the Aidersen but also the entire Valley. They scrutinised and criticised the entire five centuries of the Valley’s existence, adopting the opinion of the old reactionaries, who supported that they would have been better off without that enormous spiritual endeavour. They turned against “the 200”, the founders of the Valley, and strongly denounced the whole project aimed at the premature evolution of our species, arguing that in order to get there, hundreds of thousands of years were needed and that the Valley was a danger to the mental balance of our race. They also insinuated that many great and wise men are born in our time, but many of them are not entirely mentally stable.”
Finally, they said that no artificial leaps forward were necessary or welcome, and that the simplest of their recommendations to the Valley was that they should be careful because “apart from predisposing future generations to a higher intellectuality, they were also predisposing them to severe psychoneurosis.”
Neither the Aidersen Institute nor anyone else from the Rosernes Dal ever responded to these accusations and insults. As I heard, throughout this decade of debate and controversy, the Valley was defended by both their colleagues from the Elders of Lesley Gate—those specialised in the same sectors and fields of studies as them—and by great spiritual personalities from outside the Valley, major intellectuals, foreign to the field of medical sciences, most of whom were graduates of the great universities and institutes of the 9th century, ranging from those of Grand Torneo and Blomsterfor to those of New Upsala.
I remember what
Atterman of Blomsterfor once said: that for a new species that’s still in its prime, like the human species, it is ridiculous to express fears of its degeneration and eventual downfall. “Only during the last few centuries have we slightly begun to find our way,” he used to say, “and we have no connection to the ancient spirit anymore. Our decline is still very far away.”
However, it is said that the venerable metropolises of the North and, above all, the alma mater of the modern spirit, the eternal Norfor, stood as the most powerful defenders of the Volkists. Carstens, Orlik, Vera Brandes and the Ekersborg Institute condemned those few scientists that were “searching for pathological causes in order to explain and simultaneously spoil the kindest and truest discovery of the human spirit in history.” They even reminded them that countless times in the past great universal truths and discoveries in science and other areas of the human spirit had seemed completely improbable and were severely criticised. And countless times in the past the pioneers had been unfairly blamed and scorned and had suffered a very “unhappy” ending.
As far as the accusations that the Valley “doesn’t give birth to very robust animals” are concerned, the defenders argued that “that’s not supposed to be its purpose at all; plus such a mission wouldn’t be very honourable”. We abound in beings with spiritual mediocrity that are only useful for their own well-being and not worthy of doing anything more. But we also abound in beings with true spiritual superiority and faith and real capability for global contribution, and yet, none of those beings who have lived among us, from ancient times until today, would fit your measurements of the ideal psychological type of human being, the robust animal that you preach about.”