I share with many people -from the group of people who like to read- the learning experiences that were extracted from books. Like so many others, I have been amazed at man's capacity to reproduce and increase the whole range of knowledge. As an example, a magnificent image comes to my mind. It is the image that I visualized reading for the first time the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel by the Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez.

This magnificent writer convinced me that Remedios, the most beautiful woman with the purest soul, ascended to heaven body and soul, smiling like an angel, waving goodbye with her hands like a child. Remedioss helped to fold the sheets and in her ascent she let go of the rustic nightgown that covered her. The sheets rose with her, covering her naked body, blending in with the clouds.

Ursula, now almost blind, was the only one who had the serenity to identify the nature of that irreparable wind, and left the sheets at the mercy of the light, seeing Remedios, the beautiful one, who was waving goodbye to her, amidst the dazzling flutter of the sheets that rose with her, that left with her the air of the beetles and the dahlias, and passed with her through the air where the four o'clock in the afternoon ended, and were lost with her forever in the high airs where not even the highest birds of memory could reach her.

When I read something so sublime, so wonderfully well written and so truly moving, I cannot help but be amazed at the author's ability to move fibers (beliefs in the impossible, the archetypal) that are so deeply buried. Such is the power of the writing that it demolishes any stubborn rational thinking and gives way to a joy in the imagination that can stay forever. What a great achievement! What a tremendous difference between such a writer and so many other writers.

Fortunately for readers, the human imagination is so prolific that we can fill many shelves with the books of authors who make a difference. Literature; novels, short stories and poetry, shakes hands and complements historical compendiums, in a much needed alliance. Theoretical books very commonly make use of literature to illustrate themselves with authors who have established the differences. Thus it was that Freud made use of the characters of the literature of ancient Greece, to support himself in the description of the behavior of his contemporaries. This is how Philosophy, as an endeavor to understand the world, seems that it could not be explained without extracting the essence of poetry and relying on it.

Sometimes the world is convulsed, the waters of understanding are so violently roiled and everything seems so confused that people, who cannot bear to feel isolated in the small part of the world in which they live, choose to ostensibly and drastically mark the differences. It doesn't matter, then, if you are an outstanding man, a giant of thought, someone who has broken schemes and helped to think the world and people's experiences in it.

When I began to think of a few lines to talk about a life experience in the key of the word difference, two images came to my mind: that of Remedios ascending to heaven and that of a love story between two very different people. I have made both images mine because they are a great guide in my life.

I will try to summarize the strange love story. It is a love story that anyone with curiosity can read on the internet and that has produced countless reviews and theoretical treatments. It is the love story between the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the philosopher Hannah Arend.

The two met in 1924. He was a professor at the University of Marburg in Germany, 35 years old, married with two children. She was his 18-year-old Jewish student. They lived a torrid story of forbidden love. To do her degree thesis Hannah leaves Marburg, later she marries and while Heidegger joins the National Socialist party and persecutes all the dissidents of the Nazi ideas, Hannah is persecuted by the Gestapo and imprisoned in a concentration camp from which she flees just before being executed.

It is one of the strangest love stories I know. Hannah, who coined the term "The Banalization of Evil" and who left a magnificent work on the human condition, worked hard to place Heidegger's name as the best in the history of philosophy, while maintaining an emotional closeness that ran through her life. Both philosophers, so different in age, origin and thought, died in the same year.

This story is a life lesson for me. Not about the persistence of love. No. It is a lesson about the mysteries of the human mind and spirit.

It is in the difference that the greatest mysteries of which we are capable are born. Whether it is the ability to construct the most beautiful images, such as that of Remedios ascending to heaven, or that of a highly intelligent woman who places at the top the name of the man who justified and encouraged the persecution of her people.