A collection of favorite poems. One of them is by Stephen Crane, who wrote: "I saw a man pursuing the horizon; / Round and round they sped. / I was disturbed at this; / I accosted the man. It's futile, I said, / You can never ̓/ You lie, he cried, / And ran on."

“… the shadows of death are the spices of love, and eternal life would be the school of absolute coldness. We love a being that the morrows threaten, and love her all the more as she is more threatened….” Albert Caraco was born in 1919 in Constantinople in a Jewish family established in Turkey for four centuries. He grew up in Prague, Berlin, and Paris, where he attended Janson-de-Sailly high school, and got his degree from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales. In 1939, he and his parents fled Europe to South America at the break of World War II, and settled in Montevideo after living in Brazil and Argentina, where his first books were published. Albert Caraco acquired Uruguayan citizenship and retained it for the rest of his life. Back in Paris in 1949, he started writing his immense body of work, part of which remains unpublished to this day. An ambiguous figure, Albert Caraco built nothing short of a baroque literary cathedral, rife with contradictions, yet rising from an uncompromisingly pessimistic foundation. In 1971, consistent with what he had announced recurrently in his semainiers (weekly diaries), he killed himself just a few hours after his father died. The death of his mother in 1963 was the occasion for a reckoning of his relationship with the woman he reproached for having given him birth, while praising her for forming his taste and character and uprooting the sheer possibility of consoling illusions in her only son. The result was Post Mortem, a bittersweet lament and a love poem in prose that offers a glimpse into his bleak worldview and an abstract of his works.

The Journal of Raïssa Maritain, composed of the sundry diaries, notes, and fragments of Raïssa Maritain’s substantial bibliography, tells the story of a soul in love with God. Compiled by her husband Jacques, these writings bear witness to the depth of Raïssa’s spiritual experiences, the warmth of her embrace for the contemplative life and silent prayer, the sweeping expanse of her intellectual powers, the sheer breadth of her sufferings, and, above all else, her willingness to undergo the “martyrdom of the heart,” offering to God a total gift of self. For readers already familiar with Raïssa Maritain, especially through her poetry, the Journal is an occasion to remember with renewed vigor truths already known; for the new reader, it is an illuminating introduction to one of the great mystics of the twentieth century.