3012
In 1795, Immanuel Kant drafted a "project for perpetual peace" designed to eradicate war forever. For the German philosopher, as for all of us, only peace guarantees well-being and happiness. And what if this were not so? What if war were the ideal condition for humanity? In the year 3012 AD, men have lived in peace for centuries; yet feelings of solidarity, loyalty, and friendship have dissolved, replaced by a pervasive and immense hatred that requires a ruthless repressive apparatus to be kept in check. The author imagines that, after twenty centuries, a researcher discovers a manuscript by an anonymous writer recounting the advent of the Prophet, the one who preached "perpetual war." According to the anonymous chronicler (doubt is necessary, as legend and historical fact intertwine), the Prophet was a young *vitellone* named Antalo, who lived in Fellinia working as a porn star. He fell in love with a splendid woman who convinced him to follow her to the "Capital of the World," a megalopolis of fifty million inhabitants. It was a trap: his body was meant to rejuvenate wealthy old men, desperate to regain their former vigor. Antalo managed to escape and would become the protagonist of numerous adventures—some amusing, others chilling, all of them astonishing, and often serving as a metaphor for today's world, Italy in particular. At a writers' competition (Antalo was the author of incomprehensible poems, the subject of constant and conflicting interpretations), the future Prophet met a young woman who had entered with war novels and introduced him to a fourteenth-century poem describing chivalric clashes, massacres, and quartered bodies, extolling war, martial courage, concord among fighters, and magnanimity toward the vanquished. It was a revelation. > He put down the book. He held his head in his hands and a Voice spoke within him, saying: go and announce to the world that the accursed age of peace has ended. (...) The darkness will be torn asunder, the virtues believed lost will shine once more, and the brightest among those virtues will be generosity, the love of justice, and mercy toward the weak . But what will be the rules of this new era of war? Chivalric customs and respect for nature. And indeed, in the "memorable sayings" through which the Prophet outlined his vision, it is written: > the war that God wills is just and holy, as long as it is waged against true enemies. But if an enemy, to escape me, climbs a tree, I cannot cut down the tree to bring him down, for the tree is not my enemy . The editor informs us that a new era dawned, but of the "beautiful, just, holy, and necessary" war, little remained. Men > began slitting one another's throats with such enthusiasm that no natural or supernatural force could have stopped them anymore. The human race, then, lived through an unrepeatable season of violence and bloodshed, but was no unhappier than it had been in the past. On the contrary, it was almost happy . And so the anonymous chronicler was right to conclude, > and thus all that is born of man on this Earth is destined to pass away. (...) Amen . It should be made clear that the book is not an essay, but a fully fledged novel, set in a fantastical yet not improbable future. It is a sequence of events over the course of which poor Antalo, a naive young man, finds himself, in spite of himself, the victim of mysterious and incomprehensible forces, all of them violent and cruel. Even when he kills, he does so because he is forced to, refusing to become a manhunter (one of the pastimes in the era of peace), despite knowing that this choice would save his life. Likewise, he rejects rampant corruption and longs to love, not merely to have sexual encounters. He is, in short, "a fish out of water" in the > Great Capital of the World; and it is precisely this innocence that makes him a visionary, capable of giving humanity and the world a sense of perspective. Through an ostensibly ironic and cynical novel, Vassalli wants to tell us that utopia is necessary, but it demands free and naive spirits. The prose is very far removed from that of *The Chimera*, but this is as it must be, for it is an account aimed at capturing the bare essence of the Prophet's story. The flaw of the narrative lies in its excessive references to contemporary Italy—amusing at first, but ultimately tedious and predictable: it almost seems as if the author wanted to settle so many scores". Why read it? It is astonishing.