The Light of Argentina: a philosophy diary Conversations with Hannah Arendt began on the seventeen hour bus trip from the international Book Fair in Buenos Aires to San Miguel de Tucumán where Hannah Arendt’s phrase to open the eyes of the mind summoned the narrator to answer as she watched the Argentine light across expanses of land. Reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s diaries written in French where she engages with the life of Existentialism, Thomas Merton’s philosophical confrontation in his conversion to Catholicism as a Trappist monk in the autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Rodin and Cezanne notebooks in its single minded trek through Hannah Arendt’s thoughts, far away from the centers of the world in a small city in northwestern Argentina, in one of the poorest regions of Argentina known for its stark beauty, corruption and fighting, land of the Incas and even earlier of the Diaguita warriors, philosophy comes to life with Hannah Arendt’s insistence on a common world of action.
Your book The Light of Argentina is a philosophic dialogue conducted by you and Hannah Arendt, who is represented through her many texts. The Light is both vivid and poignant, and reveals Argentina in its overwhelming combination of stark beauty and ferocious violence. In your dialogue with Arendt, you come to realize that your own experience, no matter how particular and individual it may seem, is part of a common world, which you share with others, and, perhaps most important, in which and with whom you can act in concert.
Jerome Kohn, Trustee, Hannah Arendt Bleucher Literary Trust
The poem Hands is lovely and Another Argentina is a stunning piece of work.
Madeleine l'Engle
....I believe in what you are doing and truly love the poem about Amaicha.
Ruth Stone
Alexandra