LURADIO

Fourier, to be polite, was an eccentric; to be accurate, he was probably off his rocker. His world was a fantasy: the earth, he believed, had been given a life of eighty thousand years; forty thousand of ascending vibrations and the same number of descending. In between (never mind the arithmetic) lay eight thousand years of the Apogee du Bonheur. We lived in the fifth of eight stages of advancement, having pushed through confusion, savagery, patriarchism, and barbarousness. Ahead lay Guaranteeism, and then then the upward slope of Harmony. After we reached utter bliss, however, the seesaw would tip and we would work our way right back down through all the stages to the beginning.

But as we worked our way ever deeper into Harmony, things would really begin to pop: a Northern Crown would encircle the Pole, shedding a gentle dew; the sea would become lemonade; six new moons would replace the old solitary satellite; and new species would emerge, better suited to Harmony: an antitilion, a docile and most serviceable beast; an antiwhale, which could be harnessed to ships; an antibear; antibugs; and antirats. We would live to be one hundred and forty-four years old, of which one hundred and forty-four years old, of which one hundred and twenty years would be spent in the unrestricted pursuit of sexual love.

from The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner