Rubem Alves was a theologian, philosopher, and psychoanalyst who lived in the mountains of Brazil but seemed to write for people on the coast of Connecticut. His warm and avuncular thoughts transcended continents and cultures to touch any human heart.

Alves saw the meaning of life in a kernel of popcorn. He saw connections between gardening and politics, pain and poetry, soup and sex. He opined on toys with batteries. He saw beauty in the most mundane. He offered insights to the soul.

“Candles cry when they illuminate,” he wrote. “Their tears, born of fire, spill over and run down their body. They cry because they know that, to shine, they must die.”

Once you’ve read that, you can never see candles the same again.

But then it’s your birthday, and you think about this:

“The custom of blowing out birthday candles is morbid. A candle should never be blown out. There’s always the danger that the gods won’t understand what we’re asking for when we extinguish the flame, a symbol of life.”

He can’t even make popcorn without getting all metaphysical about it. Those little kernels seem so hard and inedible, so useless, so inferior to the sweet yellow nuggets on a cob. But when you heat them up — give them a trial by fire — most of them blossom into something beautiful.

The kernels, he imagines, aren’t really happy about being boiled in oil, but that’s what they need to truly become soft and beautiful, to be what they were meant to be.

And life’s like that, isn’t it? Great transformations happen under the force of fire. Those who refuse to change under the pain of heat, the kernels that refuse to pop, remain hard and unfulfilled.

Suffering, he says, prepares the soul for a vision of something new. Pain turns into poetry, an object of communion, a sacrament. The vocation of poets: “to put words in places where the pain is too bad.”

And of all the vocations, he says, “politics is the most noble.” He cites an ancient Hebrew text to define politics as “the art of gardening applied to public things.”

But are all politicians noble? Most certainly not. Because vocation is one thing, profession another. In a vocation, one finds happiness in the act itself. In a profession, the pleasure is only in the gain derived, most commonly a pile of moolah.

Of all the professions, he says, “professional politics is the most vile.”

He implies that professional politicians (and lousy gardeners) come from childhoods in dumbed-down houses (all decor, no books) cursed with dumbed-down toys:

“Toys that work with only the push of a button to make something happen are dumbed-down objects — push the button, the doll sings; push the other button, the doll pees; push a button, the car goes. They don’t make us think. As soon as a girl decides to do surgery on a doll to see how the magic happens — at that moment she starts getting smart.”

Would you be surprised to know that Rubem Alves has a bookshelf in his bathroom? That explains how he cites Nietzsche, Freud, Neruda, Auden, Drummond, Eliot, Pessoa, Shakespeare, Hesse, Borges, Bachelard, Barthes, Goethe, Jesus, Peter Pan, Snow White, Cinderella, Scheherazade. He peers into the depths of Dali, Escher, Vermeer, Rodin, Bach and the Tao.

He appreciates a weed, a cow flop, a bowl of soup, ipé petals on a sidewalk, a bem-te-vi bird, trees groaning with pleasure as they rub against each other.

What is a love letter, he asks, but “a paper that connects two lonelinesses.” What is love “but a desire to eat and be eaten”? What is a laugh but “an ejaculation of joy” that reveals a secret of the soul? What is the soul but “a maze of caverns lit by a light that infiltrates through narrow cracks, caverns that grow ever deeper and darker”?

He has so much to say about the soul. Almost every page mentions it.

The soul does not like to march, he says; it’s a ballerina who likes to dance. It’s a song being played. It is lightness within the body’s weight, a butterfly within a corporeal cocoon. Its wings are called courage.

At its deepest place, it’s a scene of happiness. It craves the noble things above: truth, beauty and the good.

Rubem Alves thrusts such thoughts in the face of a military dictatorship that put power and piles of moolah above life, art, love and the soul. Alas, he did not live to enlighten us in a time of plague and planetary meltdown. His soul emerged from its cocoon in 2014 and left us here to figure stuff out on our own.

Glenn Alan Cheney is managing editor of the literary press New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@cheneybooks.com.