My recent work in philosophy has led me to approach literature with a different eye. I read in search of what remains after the story has been told, excavating a work until I find, when it is there, something capable of transcending its plot, its time, and even the immediate intentions of the person who wrote it.
For my three miles this Sunday, I chose a different route as well. I usually prefer the quieter streets of Coral Gables, solitary, introspective walks that allow thought to move at its own pace. This time, I decided to cross the city’s commercial district. It has a particular kind of bustle. Cafés and sidewalk tables extend the life of restaurants and shops out onto the street. The food brings together flavors and traditions from around the world, while the Mediterranean architecture preserves the classicism through which Coral Gables learned to recognize itself. I walked among conversations, aromas, terraces, and passersby. Almost without realizing it, I had chosen a route made of encounters.
I continued along Ponce de Leon toward the large landscaped traffic circle where it meets Sevilla. The names began accompanying my thoughts as well. Ponce de Leon, Sevilla, Valencia, Almeria, Malaga. I was walking through an American city whose geography still pronounced, with perfect ease, names inherited from Spain. There stood Los Ranchos.
A few weeks earlier, I had met Ken Salazar there during a private presentation of Borderlands, My Fight for an Inclusive America, published in 2026. I had been invited to the gathering as a writer. Among those attending were people who knew Salazar and had followed his public career for years. I had arrived at that table by a different path. I had arrived through books.
Passing that place again reconfigured the memory. My recent philosophical work had also changed the way I approached a book. What a book told me was no longer enough. I felt the need to excavate the consciousness that had produced it, the circumstances that had accompanied its creation, and whatever its author had considered worthy of remaining after those circumstances ceased to exist.
Salazar came to writing from public service. He had served as a United States senator, secretary of the interior, and U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Borderlands traveled through part of that experience from the perspective of a personal history deeply rooted in the American Southwest. Salazar himself has spoken of four centuries of family history around the San Luis Valley and the headwaters of the Rio Grande, also known as the Río Bravo. I thought then of Colorado, a Spanish word, and mentally retraced the names I had just passed. Ponce de Leon, Sevilla, Valencia, Almeria, Malaga. They were remnants of other historical circumstances, long since absorbed into the everyday life of an American city. History had left behind an amalgam of names, origins, and belongings that time had turned into landscape.
Borderlands took on a different resonance. Salazar has said that with the book he hoped to communicate our history and, even more importantly, our future. In its pages, that future is associated with a closer relationship among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. As I walked through an American city filled with Spanish names, integration began to seem to me like more than a political aspiration. Cultures have been passing through one another for centuries, leaving behind words, foods, customs, architecture, and ways of understanding the world. Integration does not require forgetting. Borderlands awakened another curiosity in me. I began looking into men who had occupied extraordinary places in history and who, after passing through those circumstances, had felt the need to return to them through words.
I did not undertake a comparative reading of their works. I followed another path. I looked into the origins of those books, the circumstances that made them possible, and the human intention that seemed to survive behind their pages. Winston Churchill appeared early in that search. Between 1948 and 1953, he published the six volumes of The Second World War. Nearly five thousand pages through which one of the central protagonists of that war returned to circumstances that already belonged to the irreversible. Decisions had become facts, and facts were beginning to become history. Writing allowed him to revisit them from the consciousness of the man who had lived through them. There is something profoundly human in that return. History can record dates, military movements, victories, defeats, and consequences. The person who lived inside it also retains the experience of having had to discern while the outcome was still unknown. Churchill left behind his interpretation of that time and, with it, something of the consciousness from which he had passed through it.
Nelson Mandela led me toward a different circumstance. Long Walk to Freedom appeared in 1994, although its origins reach back to Robben Island, where Mandela clandestinely began an autobiographical manuscript in 1976. His fellow prisoners took part in revising it, and a copy eventually made its way out of the prison. Imprisonment introduces another dimension into memory. The years taken from him already belonged to the irreversible. No freedom that came later could return them to him. Words offered another form of recovery. Mandela could return to what he had lived, discern it, and decide what meaning it would hold within the consciousness of the man who had survived it. External freedom would come later. Interior Sovereignty had needed to be exercised long before.
Jawaharlal Nehru carried that relationship between confinement and consciousness into another territory. He wrote The Discovery of India during five months of his imprisonment at Ahmednagar Fort. Published in 1946, the book undertook a journey through India’s past, from ancient times to the final years of British colonial rule. I was fascinated by the thought of him. A man physically confined was devoting his consciousness to traveling across centuries. The space available to his body had been reduced, and from within it his thought attempted to encompass a civilization. His personal circumstance ultimately opened onto a much larger inquiry into history, identity, and belonging.
Jimmy Carter surprised me. After leaving the presidency of the United States, writing accompanied him for decades. He would publish thirty-two books spanning memoir, politics, peace, faith, aging, human rights, poetry, and other territories of human experience. In 2003, he even published The Hornet’s Nest, A Novel of the Revolutionary War, a venture into historical fiction set during the American Revolution. That small detour interested me particularly as a novelist. Carter had written extensively about events he knew, decisions in which he had participated, and convictions that had accompanied him. Fiction allowed him to make a different kind of movement. He could imaginatively enter a circumstance that had taken place long before he was born. Memory works with what we have lived. Fiction can also allow us to explore what we could never have lived.
Ronald Reagan likewise returned to the course of his life after leaving the White House. An American Life, published in 1990, traces his life and political experience through his years in the presidency. The office was gone, and what remained was once again the individual before his own memory, trying to order through words what for eight years he had been required to confront through the exercise of power.
Churchill, Mandela, Nehru, Carter, and Reagan had entered my walk from extraordinarily different geographies, eras, and experiences. Their books did not belong to a single literary category either. Yet something was beginning to bring them together in my mind. They had lived through a circumstance and afterward had wanted to transform some part of it into transmissible thought. For my own purposes, I began calling it the literature of legacy. The expression is not meant to establish a new genre. It helps me name a human phenomenon that this walk had begun to reveal to me. Experience passes through consciousness. Consciousness returns to memory. Words attempt to preserve what the individual considers worthy of being entrusted to someone he may never know.
And then I returned to Salazar. His case held a proximity for me that none of the others could. I had sat only a few steps away from him. I had received his book from his hands. Now, weeks later, I was walking past the place where that encounter had occurred, and I understood that my memory of it had changed as well. The public conversation surrounding Borderlands also offers a way to observe the tensions that accompany any attempt to turn a political life into legacy. In an interview, journalist Eyder Peralta pressed Salazar on the human consequences of certain immigration policies implemented during his diplomatic tenure and directly raised the tension between those measures and the values of welcome proclaimed by the United States. Salazar responded by defending legal avenues for migration, work, asylum, and refugee protection that could spare migrants the dangers of long journeys to the border.
That conversation, too, is part of the excavation. A written legacy inevitably comes into contact with other consciousnesses. The author offers his interpretation. The reader retains the sovereignty to examine it, confront it, and decide what he finds there.
I kept walking. Ponce de Leon crossed Sevilla again. Valencia, Almeria, and Malaga were nearby. The Spanish names remained embedded with perfect ease in the American landscape. I thought again of Salazar, of his roots, of Mexico, Canada, and the United States. I thought of Churchill returning to the war, Mandela writing from Robben Island, Nehru traveling through India from inside a prison, Carter discovering even fiction, and Reagan returning through memory to his own life. The traffic circle was the same. My memory of that place was not.
Every excavation modifies, in some way, what we believed we had remembered once and for all. The facts remain, and our consciousness returns to them from a different configuration. Perhaps part of our Interior Sovereignty resides there, in our ability to return to what we have lived and discover meanings we were not yet prepared to recognize. My three miles were coming to an end. They had not taken me very far through Coral Gables. I had crossed a handful of streets, a lively procession of cafés and restaurants, Spanish names transformed into American geography, and a traffic circle I had known for years.
That morning had been different. Churchill, Mandela, Nehru, Carter, Reagan, and Salazar had walked with me. And I was returning home with the suspicion that some walks end long after the final mile has been traveled.