Octavio
PazOctavio
Paz
1914 - 1998
Mexican diplomat
"Solitude
is the profoundest fact of the human condition.
Man is the only being who knows he is alone."
Wrote Labyrinth of Solitude, in 1950 while serving in France.
Ambassador to India, 1960s, where he wrote the Monkey Grammarian
Sensitive interpreter and commentator on our times, Latin identity and importance of Latin American experience in world affairs.
Paz stressed:
the universal feeling of separation, a common search for identity, the loss of meaning, the overiding importance of history and significance of human culture in defining our place in nature, society and the world.
Writers are the guardians of language, its meaning and motivation.
Paz was the
Grandson of a writer, intellectual.
Son of a journalist, who was also the Secretary to Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican populist revolutionary.
Octavio Paz uses the metaphor of the ancient
maze or Labyrinth to investigate the estrangement
and isolation of Solitude as an underlying, formative and ongoing essential
quality in Mesoamerican identity.
"Labyrinth -- one of the most fertile & meaningful mythical symbols,
the TALISMAN, or the object
of restoring health and freedom to a people at the center of a sacred area."
p. 209.
"The idea of a continuous present turns all the presences in which reality manifests itself into phantasms."
"Thanks to the presence of God, nature becomes active."
"History has the cruel reality of a nightmare and the grandeur of humans consists in their making beautiful lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare . . . it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision, in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality -- if only for an instant -- by means of creation."
p. 104.
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