Another year goes by. And people on Earth make plans. There is no doubt that conventions can be powerful for an animal that has little beyond them. Laws, democracyreligions and morals wander under an absolute void of foundation. I have always been passionate about biology. This led me, among other reasons, to medical school. I have always felt a halo of beauty and tragedy in the theory of natural evolution and its structural blindness. Consciousness is an unfortunate evolutionary leap. Absolute clarity about the human condition is an unbearable symptom. It would be better if we had never reached this excessive degree of consciousness. Who said natural evolution knows what it's doing? Unfortunately, the offer in Portuguese is precarious about the author I'm going to talk about here today. The Brazilian publishing market is increasingly divided, for the most part, between ideological houses and houses that only want poor quality bestsellers, when the two traits do not mix. This is Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian, non-practicing lawyer, mountaineer and philosopher, who died in 1990. "The Last Messiah", a booklet, exists in Portuguese, although I have never seen this translation. His greatest work, which I read in English, "On the Tragic", as far as I know, was not translated into Portuguese. Zapffe falls into that rare tradition in philosophy called by some "lunar philosophy." The bulk of philosophers, one way or another, belong to "solar philosophy". Being lunar means not believing that at the end of the day, or times, the intrinsic order, which tends towards good, imposes itself. Believing in this order makes you a solar being. In this sense, lunar would be authors such as the Roman Lucretius, the French Pascal, in the 17th century; Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, in the 19th century; Unamuno, Freud, Jung, Camus, Cioran and Zapffe, in the 20th century; John Gray, in the 21st century. Before anyone jumps in with ear corrections, Nietzsche is a demilunar, or half-lunar. A characteristic of Zapffe is to start from biology —more specifically from the theory of evolution— to say that consciousness, and its excessive cognitive condition, was an evolutionary leap that went wrong. A weight for the fragile human species that drags itself through the world creating outlets for this excess of consciousness. A well-known analogy that Zapffe makes is with the extinct prehistoric elk that, with its exuberant and powerful branches on its head, ended up succumbing to the weight they meant in everyday life. In the case of consciousness, its functions are adapted to the tragedy of its excessive condition. Zapffe lists these adaptations, or escapes, as anchoring —rigid escape mechanisms, such as religions or political ideologies—, isolation —escape from thought obsessed with the unbearable of consciousness—, distraction —occupying oneself, close to Pascal's "divertissement"— and sublimation —making agony into art, philosophy, literature, close to Freud. The unbearable mentioned above can be understood by the insoluble contradiction between our infinite desire and the indifference of the universe — close to Camus' idea of absurdity. Doubting oneself and the world, anticipating the future, seeing the deep emptiness, impermanence, vulnerability, contingency, death, silence and darkness of infinite spaces that terrified Pascal. All of these realities are attributes of our perception. In Zapffe, the world is not tragic, nor are aesthetics or morals themselves tragic. Tragic is the natural evolution of the species, towards its full consciousness, or the absolute clarity of its own condition. In this sense, the lucidity that comes from clarity about ourselves — as Camus thought — is a symptom of this unfortunate evolutionary leap, this bad step in nature. As Zapffe says, nature gave us consciousness through a blind error and, in doing so, expelled us from it, making us an animal species exiled from the "paradise" of the absence of consciousness. Thus, the Norwegian philosopher read the myth of the fall of paradise. As Pessoa said, "if the heart thought, it would stop beating." If Augustine were a tragedian, he would say that we spend our lives looking for the tragic outside of us, when it is inside us. Tragic is consciousness, this unbearable condition when taken in its nakedness. "One night, in time immemorial, man awoke and saw himself", says Zapffe, in the opening of "The Last Messiah". "His wife sent him hunting", adds the author. Faced with the defenseless animal, he was overcome with compassion. That day, he was found devoured by some predator. There is much beauty in human tragedy. There is terror and there is pity.