The individual and the universe

"Individual and the universe" is a collection of essays by the renowned Argentine novelist Ernesto Sabato (1911–2011), and its first edition was published in 1945, and in the same year, he received the first prize in prose from the Municipality of Buenos Aires for this book. And this book, although it is not the most important of Sabato's well-known books, especially his novels, such as: The Tunnel 1948, and About Heroes and Graves 1961, constitutes the backbone for understanding his opinions and ideological and cultural beliefs, which he conveys in this book and other analytical critical books such as: The Writer and His Shadows 1963, and Before the End 1993. The book primarily deals with inherited social and philosophical facts, and how they affect the individual, who lives through the transformations of the twentieth century with all its artistic, cultural, and psychological movements. The author expresses his constant search for man and his true value, and criticizes the neutral morals of science. It discusses in the essays topics such as: the discovery of America, science, space, human desires, the theory of relativity, and contemporary and classical artistic and literary figures, as well as speaking, in a condensed manner, about authors such as: Aristotle, Newton, Galileo, Borges, up to surrealism, which is an artistic and literary movement in which Sabato himself participated when he was working and living in Paris. The author Ernesto Sabato comments, in the introduction to the collection, about these essays, saying: "The opinions that appear here in alphabetical order are not the result of a lazy contemplation of the world, but refer to the entities I found in my way to myself. (One heads towards distant lands, or to seek human knowledge, or to understand the nature of things, or to search for God; then notices that the ghost that was chasing him is himself). Outside my path, there must be other entities, theories, and hypotheses. The universe we talk about here is my personal world, and therefore incomplete, contradictory, and ideal." The author: Ernesto Sabato. Pages: 124. Jadal Publications