It was these attitudes that led him to leave, first for Mexico and then for Buenos Aires, before returning permanently to Valencia in 1947. There he immersed himself in a period of personal retreat, a time of prolific creativity: his inner exile. However, the journalistic coverage of his work in the 1970s brought him to a wider audience. Prestigious publishers championed his writing, and his literary consecration came in 1982 with the awarding of the Valencian Letters Prize. From that moment on, a period of social recognition also began: the Medal of Merit in Fine Arts, an honorary doctorate, the presidency of the Valencian Council of Culture…

Of all aspects of his life, I have been particularly drawn to the aforementioned “inner exile,” which is not merely a literary phase with an expiration date, but rather represents his most genuine vital spirit. The introspective personality of this Alicante-born creator led him to a militantly contemplative attitude: “My house was my world, the World. From it I have drawn everything: a house with glass walls open to the horizon. A kind of greenhouse? But with storms.” By virtue of this disposition, he experienced the indelible evocation of his childhood, in which “everything lives in perpetuity: the light, the summer, the perfume, the passing of trains, the sting of memories…”

From this perspective, we can understand his statement in  Breviarium vitae : “To have a destiny is to feel suddenly committed to an inner undertaking.” In this book, which compiles over thirty years of notes, we gain a profound understanding of its author, the impact of his thought on his own personal evolution, and the narrative of the human condition. His knowledge of this condition led him to say: “True spirituality does not consist in ‘occupying’ oneself with spiritual things, but in being spirit, in drawing within ourselves that imminent flame, which ignites and grows in our bodies with ever-increasing fervor as we gradually die.”

Gil-Albert understood the nature of love (“to truly love is to focus the attraction of the cosmos on someone”) and its nourishing character (“the beloved awakens in the lover the totality that he carries within”), but also the helplessness of its absence (“if the beloved person is denied to us, we are split with a painful feeling of something incomplete”), the meaning of loneliness (“when we realize that we are in an unmitigated loneliness, we suddenly appreciate the unusual nature of our destiny”) and its usefulness for survival (“the shiver that accompanies this kind of fatal discovery tempers us”).

With this wisdom, his craft of writing life and living through writing was inevitable: “Writing daily has been my fulfillment. A way of gradually understanding, day by day, the dispositions of this man who was, to a large extent, unknown to me. But it also happens that what is jotted down one day in the strictest privacy can become, in other hands, something seen from the outside and which, therefore, acquires the personal touch of a style… I write to clarify things for myself and I share what I write in case this path I am taking can, in some way, help others.” I bear witness and give thanks for the effectiveness of this latter purpose. His dedication was well worth the inner exile!

Pedro Paricio. Give me three minutes