In The Last Messiah, Peter Wessel Zapffe delivers one of the most lucid and unsettling meditations on the human condition ever written. In a few pages, he distills a lifetime of reflection: humanity, born with an awareness too vast for its world, is condemned to suffer from its own clarity. Consciousness, he suggests, is an overreach, a tragic error of evolution that exposes us to a bleak existence.

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Peter Wessel Zapffe (born Tromsø, December 18 1899 - died Asker, October 12 1990) was a Norwegian philosopher, writer, lawyer and mountaineer. He studied law at the University of Oslo and pursued his restless reflection on existence while scaling remote peaks and exploring the limits of human freedom in the face of nature.

Zapffe’s thought is distinguished by its rigor and radical honesty: he proposed that human self-consciousness, over-evolved for its context, leads to unavoidable conflict. His key works include "On the Tragic" and "The Last Messiah", in which he articulates a vision of human life that sees suffering and awareness as intertwined, and escape as a discipline of the mind.