[...] What makes Macedonio's story remarkable is how earnestly he wrestles with tigers that we all face. It isn't the felicity of his prose, or the prescience of his ideas -- though his prose is often felicitous and his ideas often prescient. Rather, it's the open heart with which he takes up his pen and seeks, through its wanderings, to find a way to love the sound of the kettle on the stove, the crumbled mate leaves on the tablecloth, the arrangement of the furniture in the room -- all the dull, pedestrian details of everyday life that clearly offer more irritation than fascination. And somewhere in these details, the tiny tinkerings that he inexhaustibly and minutely calibrates in every corner of his life, is the beloved. ANd in the beloved, in the other, there is passion, and death, and art, and eternity.