Octavio Paz (1914-1998) is a Nobel Prize winner who, once long ago, spoke to a ragtag group of strangers in Boston, and I was there. I remember him as a short, disheveled, earnest man who traveled with a translator. Perpetually late, I had trammeled up the ramp to crowd into the back of the cozy (crazy?) Visual and Environmental Studies building. I don’t know—and will never know—why he wasn’t speaking in a Humanities building. I suppose I saw it all as part of his phenomenon of Otherness in a reading marked by the natural delays and frustrations of speech and translation.
As a poet, Paz owes much to the Surrealists. His essays—too—read slow and deep. I’ve labored off and on for years with The Labyrinth of Solitude (Grove Press, 1985). Here is an exerpt:
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, where there is no gap between desire and satisfaction. We sense the change as separation and loss, as abandonment, 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 transcend our solitude, to re-establish the bonds that united us with life in a paradisiac past.
— from “The Dialectic of Solitude”, Chapter 9
And that, Readers—in a nutshell—is why we make friends, why my son just hopped on his first rollercoaster (to keep pace with the other sixth graders), why some people tumble into one-night stands while other couples zip their days up in a great lifelong love affair. And it’s also the Why (of course!) behind the phenomenon of Mother’s Day!
-J.F.