Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism — The Last Promontory<br>We had stayed awake all night — my friends and I — beneath mosque lamps with domes of pierced brass, starry like our souls, and like them glowing with the shuttered brilliance of an electric heart. We had long trampled upon opulent oriental carpets our ancestral sloth, arguing all the way to the outermost limits of logic and blackening many pages with frenzied writing.<br>An immense pride swelled our chests, for we felt ourselves alone, in that hour, awake and upright, like magnificent beacons or like sentinels thrust forward, facing the army of enemy stars that peered down from their celestial encampments. Alone with the stokers who thrash before the infernal furnaces of great ships, alone with the black phantoms who rummage in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched at wild speed, alone with the drunkards reeling with uncertain wingbeats along the city walls.<br>We gasped suddenly at the formidable noise of the enormous double-decker tramways that jolted past, blazing with multicolored lights, like villages in festival that the Po, overflowing its banks, uproots without warning and drags to the sea, over cascades and through the whirlpools of a flood.<br>Then the silence grew deeper still. But as we listened to the exhausted muttering of prayers from the old canal and the creaking of the bones of dying palaces upon their beards of damp greenery, we suddenly heard the ravenous automobiles roaring beneath the windows.<br>“Let us go,” I said, “let us go, friends! Partiamo! At last, mythology and the mystic ideal are surpassed. We are about to witness the birth of the Centaur and soon we shall see the first Angels fly! We must shake the gates of life to test their hinges and their bolts! Let us go! Here, upon the earth, is the first dawn! Nothing can equal the splendor of the red sword of the sun, fencing for the first time in our millennial darkness!”<br>We approached the three snorting beasts, to caress lovingly their burning breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse in its coffin, but I was immediately revived beneath the steering wheel, a guillotine blade menacing my belly.<br>The furious broom of madness tore us from ourselves and swept us through streets as steep and deep as riverbeds. Here and there a sickly lamp behind a window pane taught us to despise the lying mathematics of our dying eyes.<br>I shouted, “Scent, scent alone is enough for wild beasts!”<br>And we, like young lions, pursued Death, her dark pelt spotted with pale crosses, who ran on before us through the vast violet sky, alive and throbbing.<br>And yet we had no ideal Lover who raised her sublime figure to the clouds, nor a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses, twisted in the shape of Byzantine rings! Nothing, except the desire to free ourselves at last from the too-heavy burden of our own courage!<br>And we sped on, crushing upon the doorsteps of houses the watchdogs that curled up under our scorching tires, flat as shirt collars under a hot iron. Death, tamed, overtook me at every turn, gracefully extending her paw to me, and now and then she would stretch out on the ground with a noise of grinding jaws, sending me, from every puddle, velvety and caressing glances.<br>“Let us abandon wisdom as from a horrible shell, and hurl ourselves, like fruits spiced with pride, into the immense and twisted mouth of the wind! Let us give ourselves as food to the Unknown, not out of desperation, but simply to fill up the deep wells of the Absurd!”<br>I had barely spoken these words when I spun sharply back upon myself, with the same drunken frenzy as dogs trying to bite their own tails, and there, all at once, two cyclists came toward me, wavering before me like two arguments, both persuasive and nevertheless contradictory. Their stupid dilemma was being debated on my ground&mldr; What a bore! Uff! I cut short, and, in disgust, I hurled myself — wheels in the air — into a ditch.<br>Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Beautiful factory ditch! I savored avidly your nourishing muck, which recalled to me the sacred black breast of my Sudanese wet nurse. When I hauled myself up — a filthy, stinking rag — from beneath the overturned car, I felt the red-hot iron of joy pass deliciously through my heart!<br>A crowd of fishermen armed with lines and gouty naturalists already thronged in uproar around the marvel. With patient and meticulous care, those people set up tall scaffoldings and enormous iron nets to fish out my automobile, which lay like a great beached shark. The machine emerged slowly from the ditch, leaving behind on the bottom, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its supple padding of comfort.<br>They believed my beautiful shark was dead, but one caress from me was enough to reanimate it, and there it was, resurrected, racing once more on its powerful fins!<br>And so, our faces smeared with the good factory muck — a paste of metallic slag, of useless sweat, of celestial soot — we, bruised...