La Realidad y el Deseo (1924-1962)

Luis Cernuda conceived "Reality and Desire" as a physical urge. He wrote to exorcise the anguish of watching time pass, to capture the impact of beauty before it vanished. And yet, the driving force behind this book is an intimate fracture, one of the most radically honest confessions an author can make: "I have never found what I love in what I write." To escape complacency and his suffocating hometown, Cernuda embraced a nomadic life. When long periods of silence befell him, he understood them as the necessary rest to shed his skin: to broaden life, one must dare to be multifaceted, to have been "boy and girl, bush and bird." This book, and the accompanying "History of a Book," is the logbook of that metamorphosis. A work that, as the author himself intuited, was written for an audience yet to be born. The record of a battle that remains ours: the immensity of what we desire versus the reality that confines us.