Januarius Asongu
Some journeys are measured in miles. Others are measured in conversations. A rare few begin as ordinary commutes and end by enlarging the world.
At 5:20 p.m. today, I boarded the New Mexico Rail Runner at Santa Fe’s South Capitol Station for the hour-long journey to Sandoval County/U.S. 550 in Rio Rancho. I expected nothing more than the familiar rhythm of the train, the evening light over the New Mexican landscape, and perhaps a quiet interval between the demands of work and the welcome of home.
Instead, I met Ruben Fasani.
The encounter began almost accidentally. One of the security officers on the train—a remarkably friendly and engaging man—asked where I was from. I replied, as I often do, “West Africa.” It is usually the simplest answer. If I say Ambazonia, I may have to begin a history lesson. If I say Cameroon, I feel that I am identifying myself with the state that colonized my homeland and continues to deny the history and political identity of my people. On a train journey lasting only an hour, “West Africa” often seems sufficient.
I cannot now remember precisely how the conversation moved from the security officer and me to the gentleman seated opposite me. Conversations have their own mysterious geography. They cross borders without passports and arrive at destinations no one had planned. Somehow, the stranger across from me entered the exchange, and before long we were talking with the ease of people whose interests had been waiting to meet.
That stranger was Ruben Fasani, the Argentine sculptor and artist.
There was nothing performative about him. He did not announce his achievements or introduce himself through a catalogue of exhibitions. He possessed the quiet ease of someone accustomed to allowing his work to speak before he does. Only gradually did I learn something of the life and artistic journey of the man seated across from me.
Ruben told me that he travels to Santa Fe every year and changes the works he exhibits here annually. He had just completed this year’s visit and was travelling south to Albuquerque, where he would spend the night in a hotel before flying back the following day to Buenos Aires, Argentina. His journey from Santa Fe was therefore only one small passage within a much longer migration—from exhibition space to railway carriage, from Albuquerque hotel to airport, and finally home across continents.
He spoke of his travels as an artist, including a journey several years ago to Cairo, Egypt, for an international arts exhibition. Although his work and travels have taken him to many parts of the world, he told me that he had never visited Africa south of the Sahara. I could not help thinking that this was a journey still waiting for him—a continent of forms, colors, textures, histories, and artistic traditions that might speak powerfully to a sculptor whose work is already so deeply concerned with matter, transformation, and human presence.
In turn, I shared something of my affection for Latin America. I told him how much I love Costa Rica, a country whose natural beauty, culture of peace, and warmth of human encounter have remained with me. I also promised that my next journey to Latin America should include Argentina. Buenos Aires has long occupied a special place in the literary and cultural imagination, and now it has acquired a more personal association: it is the home of the artist I happened to meet on a train in New Mexico.
Naturally, a conversation between an Argentine and an African could not avoid football for very long. We spoke about the World Cup, Lionel Messi, and Diego Maradona. Messi represents the grace, discipline, and quiet mastery of a game brought almost to perfection. Maradona remains something more turbulent: genius mixed with struggle, triumph shadowed by tragedy, a figure whose gifts seemed at times too immense for the ordinary frailties of a human life to contain.
We also spoke about Pope Francis. I shared my admiration for him—not only as the first pope from Latin America, but as a man whose simplicity, concern for the margins, and insistence on human encounter gave his papacy a distinctive moral presence. Here again, our conversation moved without effort: from sculpture to continents, from football to Francis, from artistic exhibitions to the unpredictable journeys by which human lives take shape.
At some point Ruben asked about my own story. I told him that as a young man I had wanted to become a Catholic priest. That desire shaped my early education, my intellectual interests, and much of the person I would eventually become. Yet life did not carry me toward the destination I had first imagined. It led me instead into journalism, then into university teaching, writing, philosophy, theology, psychology, and the study of human flourishing.
Later, another unexpected turn brought me into information technology and cybersecurity. Most recently, I moved to New Mexico to work for the state government as a cybersecurity professional. Mine has not been a straight road. It has been a journey across disciplines and professions, from the seminary to the newsroom, from the university classroom to the world of digital risk and public service.
Yet I told Ruben that while cybersecurity may describe my present profession, it does not fully describe where my heart and soul reside. They remain in my writing. They live among questions of truth and knowledge, faith and reason, psychology and culture, civilization and human flourishing. They remain in the unfinished manuscripts, the books already published, and the ideas that continue to wake me before dawn or refuse to let me sleep at night.
Perhaps Ruben understood this better than most people would. Artists know that one may perform many duties in life while still possessing a deeper vocation. A person may hold a profession, yet be held by a calling. The profession organizes the working day; the calling gives the day its meaning.
As we spoke, I began to recognize a kinship between the sculptor and the writer. Ruben works with glass, ceramics, metal, and materials that have passed through heat, pressure, fracture, and transformation. I work with words, ideas, histories, arguments, and the sometimes-fragmented materials of human experience. His hands search for form within matter. My writing searches for coherence within thought.
The sculptor begins with material.
The writer begins with language.
The artist passes glass through fire.
The philosopher passes ideas through criticism.
Both hope that what emerges will reveal something that was present but not yet visible.
Both know that creation requires patience.
Both understand that form cannot be forced without risking the destruction of the material itself.
Ruben’s work is especially compelling because it does not simply hide the history of its materials. Glass retains its fragility even when shaped into strength. Recycled industrial materials carry traces of previous lives. Metal, clay, and fused fragments enter new relationships without entirely losing what they once were. Transformation does not always mean erasure. Sometimes it means allowing the broken, discarded, or overlooked to participate in a new form of beauty.
Perhaps human lives are formed in much the same way. We do not become ourselves by discarding every earlier chapter. The young man who wished to become a priest did not disappear when he became a journalist. The journalist remained somewhere within the professor. The professor accompanied the cybersecurity professional to New Mexico. Philosophy, theology, psychology, public service, and literature are not separate lives. They are fragments held together within one continuing search for meaning.
The train moved steadily southward through the evening landscape, yet our conversation travelled much farther: from West Africa to Argentina, from Costa Rica to Cairo, from Santa Fe exhibitions to the World Cup, from Pope Francis to Messi and Maradona, from sculpture to cybersecurity, and from youthful dreams to the vocations we eventually discover.
Modern travel often places us physically close while leaving us existentially distant. We sit opposite strangers and immediately retreat into our phones. Headphones protect us from the possibility of conversation. We pass through landscapes without looking outside and pass beside human beings without wondering what worlds they contain.
Yet now and then, providence interrupts this organized solitude. Someone asks a simple question. Another person joins the conversation. A railway carriage becomes, for an hour, a small republic of stories.
When the train reached Sandoval County/U.S. 550 at about 6:20 p.m., Ruben continued toward Albuquerque and the hotel where he would spend his final night before returning to Buenos Aires. I stepped off the train in Rio Rancho carrying no sculpture, no souvenir, and no carefully planned lesson. Yet I carried something equally valuable: the memory of an unexpected human encounter.
Perhaps I will visit Argentina, as I promised. Perhaps Ruben will one day travel south of the Sahara. Perhaps our paths will cross again in Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, Africa, or on another train whose passengers have not yet discovered one another.
Or perhaps that single hour will remain our only meeting.
Even so, it was enough to remind me that the world remains full of extraordinary people travelling without announcement. Sometimes they are found in museums and galleries. Sometimes they speak at universities or exhibit their work in distant capitals. And sometimes, shortly after 5:20 on an ordinary evening, they simply take the seat opposite yours.
Thank you, Ruben Fasani, for the conversation. May your work continue to turn fire, fragments, glass, and metal into forms of unexpected beauty. And may the rest of us remember to look up occasionally from our screens, greet the stranger across the aisle, and remain open to the possibility that even the most familiar journey may carry us somewhere we never expected to go.