Like naughty boys, the books play hide-and-seek. They get lost, they disappear and at the least expected moment they step out and become recovered. Like this volume that I suddenly find in the library. I wasn’t looking for it, I didn’t remember that I had it, nor had I realized that it was missing. But there it has been for years, for decades, waiting for me. That is why I took it tenderly between my fingers, although with a certain bad taste in my soul for having forgotten it for so many years. Definitely the worst death is oblivion.
But there it was, with that indefinable blush that resurrections have, that reunions have. It was published in 1986, 165 pages, in the Canal Ramírez editorial in Bogotá. Its title is the one that heads this column: the paths are two and includes a selection of columns published in El País, from Cali. The title and the book are inspired by a thought from Confucius: “There are two paths: love and the absence of love”.
Father Hernando Uribe is well known in these opinion pages of EL COLOMBIANO. Until not long ago, the Carmelite religious from Monticelo had a column published that for years comforted us and made all of his readers reflect. It was a small oasis of spirituality that many liked and served.
The book find I’m mentioning came with a bit of a surprise. Among its pages was a yellowish press clipping with a column of mine, from June 13, 1987, when I worked at El Mundo in Medellín. In it I reviewed the publication of Hernando Uribe, with whom I had the privilege of sharing many years of life, many readings and hobbies and whose friendship I still maintain between the distances and forgetfulness that old age unfortunately nurtures.
I transcribe, with the permission of the reader, some parts of the review that I mention: “Hernando Uribe’s style is clean, cut. Almost always the concept imprisons the literary expression, apparently sacrificing poetic pleasure for the good of the idea. This makes it difficult to read on many occasions. Difficult but not unpleasant or monotonous. Because if one thing is discovered when reading Uribe Carvajal’s articles, it is that he writes with joy, with delight. The pleasure of the word and of the concept elaborated on the golden wings of literary achievement penetrate each sentence, each paragraph.
And he added: “There is no rhetoric in the book we are discussing. Quickly the author takes the reader to the stone of the fruit, leaving him the pleasure of peeling and biting the flesh of the word. Hence, the density and the philosophical and theological argumentation end up deposing, joyfully, his austere face before the beautiful nudity of the phrase worked literary ”.
And he concluded with an assertion about the mood that is always noted in the writings of the Carmelite: “The reading of the paths are two enriches. It is the great lesson of Hernando Uribe: his joyful and optimistic experience of Christianity. As if spirituality were the poetic version of theology, religiosity gets rid of harassing moralisms to breathe airs of freedom. Supported by modern theology, the conception of spiritual life that Uribe Carvajal proposes goes beyond soft pietism and the anguishing demands of a sanctimonious asceticism, to raise a banner of optimism and love for life.”
Worth this memory, tangled between the pages of a forgotten book, to pay an unexpected but deserved tribute to an old friend