It is amazing to me the occasional prescience of an obscure author
beyond their time. Here is the ending of Zeno's Conscience by Italo
Svevo from 1923. Of course, reading the novel from the first page up to
the ending adds a great deal to the feeling of empathy with the
narrator, but I doubt revealing this ending will encourage or detract
anyone here from reading an otherwise masterly novel.

"Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the
place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free
space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other
forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind
in the air. It will be followed by a great gain... in the number of
humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us
of the lack of air and of space? Merely thinking of it, I am suffocated!

But it isn't this, not only this.

Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal
who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow
realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she
strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then became the
most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her
whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof.
We don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and
it will never have undermined their health.

But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his
body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are
almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen,
and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed
extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength;
but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it
is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all
earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost
healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under
the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices,
sickness and the sick will flourish.

Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will
return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man,
in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable
explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will
be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit
sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the
center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum
effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and
the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed
of parasites and sickness."

Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience, Translated from the Italian by William
Weaver, Italian publication 1923.

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