Reading books does not make us better people, or even smarter. This depends on the decisions we make, on the commitments we assume. But reading good literature educates our sensibility, makes us amplify our existence, vicariously inhabit inner worlds that belong to others and star in adventures in places we will never go. Sometimes, we will discover that our circumstances and the crossroads that open up at our feet -which seemed unknown to us- are full of traces of the past, or have already been explored by the imagination of some prophetic novelist. At final, by reading, we become more aware of what is constant in the human being and to what extent a person can change and why. We discover that we are capable of responding to the call of good or of plunging into the abyss of evil.

On the Marble Cliffs is one of Ernst Jünger's masterpieces. When he published it in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, the author was a military laureate in World War I, whose diaries of combat in the trenches(Tempests of Steel) had delighted Adolf Hitler. But the story was immediately read as a denunciation of totalitarianism and parallels were drawn between the figure of the Führer and that of the Great Ranger, who terrorizes the peaceful population of La Marina. This called Jünger into question.

La Marina is the fictitious country where the action takes place: a fertile plain dotted with temples and vineyards, bathed by a large lake (Jünger wrote his book next to the Constanza) and watered with good wine and joie de vivre, which extends to the foot of the marble cliffs. It borders on La Campiña, the rough land from which The Great Ranger originates.

In the Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love, a refuge on that impressive elevation, live the protagonist -first person narrator, Jünger's alter ego- and his brother Othón. There reigns a harmony that is disappearing in La Marina, in a family community where the boy plays with the snakes, while the adults dedicate themselves to reading in the Library Services, cultivating the garden and studying their plants by the hand of Linnaeus. Occasionally, they go down to the village to participate in its lighthearted agricultural festivities. Rumors of the destruction caused by the Great Ranger and his carnivorous packs of dogs, with whom they once fought the Mauritanians, reach the village. The threat makes the protagonist and his brother rethink the possibilities of force, to which they had already resorted in their youth.

Acantilados is a poetic and sententious novel, evocative and symbolic. A book that demands to enjoy every page without rushing to follow a plot that has episodes of violence, but above all memories and reflections. Between them, a conflict is insinuated that demands a response from the protagonists and, of course, from the reader: to fight violence with more violence, or to oppose nihilism by cultivating an order capable of refund peace to souls and bodies. To bring order from outside or from within. To limit oneself to remember with nostalgia what has been lost, or to keep it alive for future generations.

A business manager may be frustrated to see that the problem of nihilism has no organizational solution, since it is not caused by the external disposition of the means, but is a disease of the spirit. Every reader today is alarmed to understand that this is a danger that has not disappeared with the defeat of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, but is still with us, especially in times of naïve technological disruption. Some will be exasperated to see two former leaders taking refuge in the spiritual force of words, in the fragile order of botany, instead of taking up arms, of showing their faces. But all will be able to recognize that there is only one right way to deal with people, and that only in this way can harmony be restored in a time of unwelcome divisions and unbridled activism. And they will read with pleasure and enjoyment this and other lucid and beautiful passages:

"It took a spirit as impartial and free as Brother Othon's to create a harmony like the one that reigned among us. Brother Othon's principle was to treat the people who approached him as if they were priceless treasures discovered on a journey. On the other hand, he liked to call men optimates, by which he implied that they all form the natural aristocracy of this world and that each one of them, on the other hand, can do us great good. He conceived men as repositories of something marvelous and to all he dispensed a princely attention . And, really, all the people who approached him opened up like plants awakening from a winter sleep, and not because they became better than they were, but because they came closer to themselves".