BOOKS

Books by Leonardo Duerto

Symbols, grief, philosophy, and the inner life

Two related series of short, contemplative books: one reading symbols and sacred images as diagrams of the inner life, the other testing philosophy against a single life.

Series

Hermetism

A series of short, contemplative books that read the oldest symbols we have, myth, scripture, philosophy, and the images hung on a thousand walls and never truly looked at, not as creeds to believe but as diagrams of the inner life. Each volume takes a single human difficulty and follows it to the hidden structure underneath.

The Center of the Cross book cover
Current book

Hermetism, Volume 2

The Center of the Cross

Crucifixion, Lacan, and the Geometry of Grief

Leonardo Duerto · Stavanger, 2026

The Center of the Cross is a work of independent reflection on suffering, loss, and the strange architecture of the Crucifixion.

Through the figures gathered around the cross, Christ suspended, Magdalena grasping, the Virgin standing, and John witnessing, the book explores the positions a human being takes before grief.

At its center is a simple but difficult insight: the deepest wound is not solved by explanation, restoration, or revenge. It is approached through the empty center, the place where the demand for an answer finally falls silent.

Drawing on Christian iconography, Lacanian psychoanalysis, personal testimony, and the geometry hidden inside old Crucifixion paintings, the book asks how a person can stand before what cannot be repaired.

Get it on Amazon
Do Not Hold Me book cover

Hermetism, Volume 1

Do Not Hold Me

On Suffering, the Empty Center, and the Freedom of the Open Hand

Leonardo Duerto · Stavanger, 2026

You climb the stairs in the evening, and your legs are heavy. Nothing has happened. And yet by the ninth step the tiredness has become a verdict on the whole worth of your life, delivered in your own voice, so that you mistake it for the truth.

Do Not Hold Me begins there, and goes somewhere most books are afraid to follow.

It is about the oldest mistake we make in the face of suffering: the belief that if we could just get back to the lost love, the old life, the person we used to be, the hole at the center would finally close.

It will not tell you the wound heals. It will not sell you peace. What it offers instead is the one thing no one says out loud.

Get it on Amazon

Series

Everything Works Out for the Good (Todo Obra Para Bien)

Where Hermetism reads the symbol from the outside, this series turns the same instruments on a single life: the author’s own. It begins from a sentence people say to console each other and almost never test, that everything works out for the good, and refuses to let it stay a comfort. The guide is Plotinus; the evidence is memory, examined without the softening that hindsight usually grants.

Todo Obra Para Bien book cover

Everything Works Out for the Good, Volume 1

Todo Obra Para Bien

A Personal Reckoning with Neoplatonism

Leonardo Duerto · Stavanger, 2026

A hospitalization. A decade of marriage built on a lie. Two years of unemployment. A father who hid his son in parks.

This book is a test of a proposition: that the universe tends toward the good, not as comfort theology, but as structure. Using Plotinus as a guide and one man's life as the evidence, it asks whether todo obra para bien can be defended by someone sitting inside consecutive catastrophes.

It cannot be called philosophy and it cannot be called memoir. It is what happens when the two become the same thing.

Get it on Amazon
Inhabiting the Scar book cover

Everything Works Out for the Good, Volume 2

Inhabiting the Scar

Transmuted by Fire

Leonardo Duerto · Stavanger, 2026

The wound closes. The mark stays. What do you do with the part of you that healed wrong?

Where the first book asked whether everything works out for the good, this one begins after the verdict is in, with the body that survived and the scar it carries. It is about what fire leaves behind: not the destruction, but the harder question of what to do with what remains.

It is not a recovery story. It is what happens when you stop waiting to be whole and learn to live as the thing the fire made.

Get it on Amazon

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