Humanize the Earth

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Book by Silo wrote in spanish in 1989

Explanation

Humanize the Earth is a collection of three writings that have in common their style of poetic prose, an exhortative turn of phrase, and numbered passages. The first work, The Inner Look, was completed in 1972 and revised in 1988; the second, The Internal Landscape, was written in 1981 and subsequently revised in 1988; and finally, The Human Landscape was completed in 1988. Between the initial publication of The Inner Look and its revision sixteen years elapsed, during which time the book circulated in many languages of both East and West, giving rise to personal communication and correspondence between the author and readers from many latitudes. That exchange surely contributed to the author’s revisions of several chapters as he observed how the different cultural substrata in which the work was circulating gave rise to many differences in interpretation of the texts. Certain words in particular presented serious difficulties in translation, and readers would frequently misunderstand the sense in which they were used. Much the same took place with The Internal Landscape, although in that case seven years elapsed between the original publication and the author’s revisions to the text. The revisions of the first two books were finished in the same year the third book was completed, fulfilling the author’s intention to revise and update the first two books as he wrote the third and to compile all of them into a single volume. The Human Landscape, while maintaining the basic stylistic qualities of the preceding two works, unlike them emphasizes particularities of the cultural and social world. This forces a turn in the treatment of these themes that inevitably involves all aspects of this literary work. Regarding content, we can say that The Inner Look focuses on meaning in life. The principal theme of its discourse is the psychological state of contradiction. It makes explicit that suffering is the register that one has of contradiction, and that surpassing mental suffering is possible in the measure that one’s life is oriented toward non-contradictory actions in general and non-contradictory actions in relation to other people in particular. The Internal Landscape studies non-meaning in life in relation to the struggle against nihilism within each human being and in social life, exhorting readers to transform their lives into activity and militancy at the service of humanizing the world. Finally, The Human Landscape treats the question of establishing a foundation for action in the world, realigning meanings and interpretations of values and institutions that had seemed beyond question and accepted as established once and for all. The three writings that comprise Humanize the Earth are in fact three moments that follow in a sequence running from the most profound internal world—the world of dreams and symbols—toward the external and human landscapes. They involve a journey, a movement in point of view that begins in the most intimate and personal and ends in opening toward the interpersonal, social, and historical world.

Author's Conference

Translations

The book was traslated into: Catalan, Dutch, English, finnish, hebrew, italian, portuguese, russian

Original edition

Editions in other languages

Links

http://www.silo.net/collected_works/humanize_the_earth