100 brass gates of Babylon had been broken, the walls of I stroll idly along these beaches of disconcerting beauty, scaling Atlantis had collapsed and the construction of the Tower of rocks that resemble the backs of whales. Happiness here takes Babel abandoned in a confusion of tongues. They set out to on the form of well-rounded days that roll easily with build a fortress around their paradise, erecting two batteries the light. I think back on Libertalia and the grandeur of with 40 guns and watchtowers. Utopias have always isolated those humanist pirates, from the early Uskok settlements, the themselves. They created a local currency, as in Sparta, and did Victual Brothers on Gotland, the Wokou from Japanese shores not accept foreign capital. Like King Utopus, they cut the and the Brethren of the Coast in the Caribbean to Tommaso bridges of the isthmus connecting them to other lands. They Campanella’s urban ideal and Charles Fourier’s phalanstery. told each other the same story, ensconced All those who established the historical in an era they believed to be free, rebelling paradox of youth, which is subject to the against the accelerating pace of a world Happiness here takes on condition of the individual, yet governed which, in spite of itself, was crumbling. by collective desire. the form of well-rounded According to some historians, Libertalia Through the looking glass As I journey days that roll easily may have existed for five years. A battle among these islands today, I contemplate with the light. I think pitted the utopians against neighboring the ancestral existence of these great fron- peoples. The dispute brought the ram- tiers. I experience the strange feeling that back on Libertalia and parts down. The settlement was razed, the Seychelles lie at the intersection of the grandeur of those like Jericho, to such an extent it can no legendary places and today’s world, inex- humanist pirates. longer be located on a map. In a volume tricably linking memories of the past to of Flaubert’s correspondence, Margue- the future. As I probe the jungle soil, I feel rite Yourcenar underlined the phrase: as though I’m stumbling upon fragments “There was a unique moment, when the of the Tower of Babel, the footprint of an Eve from the first gods no longer existed and Christ had not yet emerged and peoples, vestiges of fallen giants. Wandering about, I come across humanity was all alone.” Libertalia was one of the rare Adam’s descendants who, as he did, refrain from eating meat moments in history when mankind was truly sovereign. Each and know how to identify flowers. They inhabit these green and generation has mysterious periods during which it truly exists, blue islands that are scattered across the sea like drowned and others when it is merely an amalgamation of laws, con- monsters, without beginning or end, their naked curves existing in trasts and governments. Somewhere off the coast of East an inverted, isolated time, a time of mirrors and royal poincianas, Africa, in the Indian Ocean, this island was, for a very brief battles and guava, in which they reinvent their origins. time, that of the last free people. 131