Under the invisible arch of language, where time pauses and the soul listens to itself, rises true literature — not as ornament, but as revelation. It is there that the word abandons the lightness of artifice and becomes a matter of conscience: the flame that both illuminates and wounds, the clarity in which the human being discovers himself. Reading is an act of pilgrimage: whoever reads crosses inner seas and, at the end of the crossing, returns transformed. In that territory where thought becomes emotion and emotion refines itself into discernment, resides the literary criticism of Vamberto Freitas. His writing, made of lucidity and tenderness, is a gesture of fidelity that resists the erosion of time and restores the dignity of the word.

As heir to the moral and aesthetic tradition of Edmund Wilson, Vamberto Freitas embodies the role of interpreter of civilization: the reader who questions the world through books, the essayist who reads the century in the light of conscience. If Wilson was the chronicler of modernity and its wounds, Vamberto Freitas is the guardian of its last clarities — a man who writes from the edge of the Atlantic, where criticism becomes liturgy and the essay a craft of hope against collapse.

In his seven volumes of BorderCrossings, Vamberto Freitas constructs a body of work that is at once memorial and prophetic. His pages are not mere essays about books: they are cartographies of consciousness, crossed by voices, seas, and memories. For him, criticism is the place where literature meets its destiny — not as ornament, but as moral necessity. His insular voice, with its universal timbre, makes the Atlantic echo as a metaphor for the human condition: the space between what we are and what we might yet become. “Literature is the mirror in which man sees and questions himself,” he writes, adding, “it is the invisible map of our humanity in transit.”

Among the great voices of the twentieth century, Edmund Wilson remains the figure closest to Vamberto Freitas — not through stylistic resemblance alone, but through ethical and intellectual kinship. Both believe that literary criticism is a moral diagnostic instrument of societies, and that the critic is, above all, a historian of sensibility. Wilson, in Axel’s Castle, To the Finland Station, and The Wound and the Bow, reinvented the role of the essayist: he made criticism a way of interpreting civilization, a field of tension between aesthetics and ethics, between the imaginary and the real. In the same way, Vamberto Freitas, in his BorderCrossings, rejects neutrality and technicism: every text of his is a statement — literary, civic, and human. Both share a humanistic and total vision of culture. For Wilson, “there is no art without history, nor history without imagination”; for Vamberto Freitas, “there is no reading without responsibility.” In both, literature is a moral mirror of societies and an antidote to nihilism. Wilson believed the essayist should be a “man of the world,” not a “priest of the text”; Vamberto writes from that same place — the reader who thinks with his whole life, not with the jargon of the moment or the academy. His prose — limpid, elegant, incisive — is a direct heir of Wilson’s moral style: a balance between reason and emotion, between analysis and witness. His criticism, like Wilson’s, has body, voice, and blood. Both write with the conviction that culture is an act of resistance against oblivion.

Wilson looked at literature as a mirror of modern history; Vamberto Freitas sees in it the spiritual extension of our own Atlantic crossing. The former saw, in the Russian Revolution, the drama of utopia; the latter sees, in diaspora and insularity, the drama of belonging. Yet both are moved by the same faith: that literary thought is the last form of lucidity in a world that trivializes everything. Following Wilson’s legacy, Vamberto Freitas renews the idea that the critic must be a total reader — not only of the work, but of the world itself.

His criticism also inherits a lineage that unites Lionel Trilling, George Steiner, Harold Bloom, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Octavio Paz — all defenders of literature as a form of moral knowledge. Like Trilling, Vamberto conceives literature as a field of conflict between values and human contradictions. Like Vidal, he makes the essay a form of combat against mediocrity, censorship, and forgetfulness. But where Vidal is corrosive, Vamberto Freitas is elegiac: he prefers the meditative tone to sarcasm, elegance to scandal. Yet both share the same conviction: literature is the most honest mirror of history, and the critic its custodian. Like Steiner, Vamberto believes culture is a continual translation of experience into language, and that every reading is an attempt to restore the sacred. With Sontag, there is an intimate parallel: both believe criticism is a form of spiritual sensuality — the encounter between intelligence and feeling, between thought and compassion. As she said, “criticism is the exercise of attention”; in Vamberto Freitas, it is also the exercise of empathy. Like Bloom, he defends the canon not as authority, but as living memory. And like Paz, he sees in poetry — and in all art — the extension of inner freedom.

What makes him singular is the way he inserts the Azores into that global tradition. He shows, masterfully, that insularity is not a limit, but a lens — a way of seeing the world both from within and from without. His criticism is transatlantic and therefore profoundly human: in it, each author is an island, and each reading, a voyage.

The seven volumes of BorderCrossings form a vast intellectual project — a “critical autobiography” in Wilson’s sense: the record of a consciousness through the readings that shaped it. The first volume opens with an inaugural gesture: thinking of literature as a mirror of identity. From the Azorean writers, Vamberto Freitas draws a moral geography of writing. The critic becomes a cartographer of the Atlantic soul. In the second and third volumes, his reflection expands to the diaspora, crossing authors from Portugal, the United States, and Canada. He writes about emigrant literature with the tenderness of one who knows that distance is also a form of belonging. In these volumes, there is an ethics of reunion: reading as return, writing as salvation.

The fourth volume is the most cosmopolitan. Criticism becomes political and civilizational — a meditation on the place of literature in the globalized world. Wilson would have recognized in this book the same impulse that led him to To the Finland Station: the desire to understand the destiny of culture through its most restless voices. The fifth and sixth volumes are more intimate and philosophical. Between the memory of loss and the reflection on time, Vamberto Freitas turns the essay into an elegy. Criticism becomes here a way of surviving — a form of fidelity to beauty. “To give public life to the best of what is published among us,” he writes, “is the most just gesture of which I am capable.”

The seventh volume, from 2023, is his point of synthesis and maturity. In it, he returns to the origin: to the Azores, to his literary childhood, to the Atlantic as mirror and wound. The prose, refined to its essence, is an act of clarity. “To look inward without ceasing to look outward” — the motto of a life lived between margins. The work of Vamberto Freitas possesses, beyond its literary value, pedagogical and civilizational dimensions. He writes to form readers — not the docile consumers of culture, but the restless beings who read to understand themselves and the world.

In BorderCrossings, the critic is a traveler. Each review is a port; each reflection, a crossing. And, as in the old ship logs, his readings are also testimonies of an era — the time when the Atlantic once again became a bridge, not a border. His style is clear yet cultivated, direct yet elegiac — combining the transparency of one who wishes to communicate with the gravity of one who knows that words can still save. It is a prose that echoes the moral poise of Wilson and the introspection of Bloom but always anchored in insular tenderness: love of land and of the book, of memory and of freedom.

There is also, in Vamberto Freitas, an intellectual courage that brings him close to Edmund Wilson and distinguishes him from academic essayism. He rejects the cult of authority, institutional conformity, and university hermeticism. His criticism is alive, combative, sometimes unsettling — because it springs from moral conviction rather than ideological belonging. Like Wilson, he writes with independence and passion. He is not a theoretician of the desk, but a reader of flesh and bone — one who believes that literary thought must respond to the anxieties of its time. In BorderCrossings, he discusses, provokes, praises, and denounces. His prose is clear, forceful, elegant, at times wounded, but always guided by an ideal of truth and never acquiescing to the powers that be. This irreverence is also a form of generosity: the critic who dares to disagree is the one who loves most deeply what he criticizes. And like Wilson, he understands that the true writer — critic or poet — is the one who still feels moved by the power of words.

The relationship between Vamberto Freitas and Edmund Wilson, already discussed here, is more profound than stylistic coincidence; it is a spiritual continuity. Both wrote at the thresholds of crises — Wilson between wars and revolutions; Vamberto Freitas, between exiles and amnesia. Both faced the decline of culture as one lights up a lantern in the fog. Both turned the essay into a genre of combat and redemption. Wilson believed that “criticism is the literary form that best expresses modern consciousness”; Freitas confirms this belief in the twenty-first century. The first analyzes the collapse of ideologies; the second observes the emptiness of language and belonging. Both share the same conviction: literature is the last territory of freedom. In an age of post-truth and exacerbated markets, Vamberto Freitas’s criticism is the contemporary echo of Wilson’s lucidity — a call to the reader’s responsibility, to the integrity of the spirit, and to beauty as an act of resistance.

There is also something maritime and mystical in Vamberto Freitas’s prose. His essays sound like logbooks of a navigator who has read the world and returns with the memory of words intact. The BorderCrossings are not merely books of criticism: they are books of faith — in art, in culture, in language as a form of communion. In a century of haste and noise, he reminds us, as Edmund Wilson once did, that to think with beauty is the last gesture of nobility left to humanity. That to read is to save, and to write, to resist.

Vamberto Freitas’s criticism is, at heart, a kind of secular prayer. He believes that reading is a form of healing and that dialogue across cultures and languages is humanity’s last hope. In a time that has become shallow and saturated, he restores to the word its original weight — not that of dogma, but of revelation. And if his BorderCrossings are “transatlantic readings,” it is because his thought is a bridge of light between continents, a lighthouse in the fog of contemporary haste. His criticism is an act of faith in the transformative power of art, a testimony that there are still those who read to understand and those who write to liberate.

As long as minds are willing to cross the margins with such lucidity, literature — and with it, hope — will continue to breathe.

Diniz Borges

(This essay, in Portuguese, was published in the Azorean Press.)