Cheerful, buoyant, ready to soar, ethereal, colorless, perfect, I sank into contemplation of the qualities of the solitary bird. "Journey to the Bird Simurgh" is Goytisolo's key work - the novel in which the great individual radically intertwines his life themes of sexuality, politics, and mysticism in a literary way. Sexuality is, for the self-proclaimed outsider, a form of subversion in itself: a component of a boundary-expanding experience where Eros and the sacred intertwine. The political sphere has always been questioned by the emigrant and tireless critic of closed systems regarding the exclusions inherent within it. Finally, Sufi poetry and Spanish mysticism, particularly in the concise form of Juan de la Cruz, guided him through his deepest existential crisis of fear and constriction. Grasping, in dreamy suddenness.