The Octavio of the day
Just something to share…
I got this book a few days ago… Reading it in English is quite strange as it’s a marvelous thing to notice how the meaning and the essence of words change when they are written in English or en Español…
These are small bits of “The Dialectic of Solitude“ which is part of “The Laberinth of Solitude” by the very Mexican, Octavio Paz. I chose this particular one because in the amazing rite of passage that I’m privileged to be going through, solitude and oneness, awareness of oneself and conciousness of being human have played essential parts of the play; because it’s beautifully written (I think so… I don’t know, I’m just a reader); because it’s one of my favorite books and because it’s always pleasant to share something that’s worth it.
Enjoy…
Solitude- the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself- is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature- if that word can be used in reference to man, who has invented himself by saying “NO” to nature- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
The foetus is at one with the world around it; it is pure brute life, unconscious of itself. When we are born we break the ties that joined us to the blind life we lived in the maternal womb, when there is no gap between desire and satisfaction. We sense the change as separation and loss, as abandonement, as a fall into a strange or hostile atmosphere. Later this primitive sense of loss becomes a feeling of solitude, and still later it becomes awareness: we are condemned to live alone, but also to trascend our solitude…
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