Abstract

GIORDANO, Alberto. Ricardo Güiraldes in His Diary: Spiritual Exercises of a Man of Letters. Anclajes [online]. 2009, vol.13, n.2, pp.115-127. ISSN 1851-4669.

Besides considering its values like biographical and cultural document, this work proposes a reading of Ricardo Güiraldes Diario, published recently in 2008, as "technology of the self" destined to maintain, by means of the daily registry of the use of the time and the advances, regressions or detentions, a program of learning and improvement through the self-control that Güiraldes oriented according to one of the facet of the Spiritual Wisdom of East, Raja-Yoga. Like a daily occasion of surveillance and accounting of profits and faults in the way of the spiritualization, the diary works, in general terms, as an appropriate tool to prop up the development of the ascetic practices. But sometimes the efficacy of some monitoring maneuvers is counterproductive, or at least paradoxical, because the obsessive character, and sometimes trivial, of the self-surveillance preserves or increases the disturbing force of what the diary's writer fears that could be unmanageable. The work concludes with a commentary of some entries of the Diario and El sendero, the other notebook of disciplines that took Güiraldes, to show how, per moments, the specifically literary practices and interests interfere with the continuity of the self-control and improvement work and turn aside to the apprentice of yogui of the spiritual goals that he has set for himself.

Keywords : Ricardo Güiraldes; Diary; Spirituality; Literary writing.

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