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Get Started. In some ways, it still is a valuable tool for interpreting Mexican public culture. What Paz calls 'the Mexican's willingness to contemplate horror' is still very much on display. Paz' description of Mexican language in The Sons of La Malinche' and his meditation on retributive justice in 'The Day of the Dead' are classics of anthropology, poetry and maybe even so This is a beautifully wrought attempt to unearth and examine some of the deep differences between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures.
Paz' description of Mexican language in The Sons of La Malinche' and his meditation on retributive justice in 'The Day of the Dead' are classics of anthropology, poetry and maybe even social science fiction. More seriously, the moment in time-the post-revolutionary, pre-electronic decades from which Paz is speaking-is gone.
Mexico has a substantial middle class that is connected to the world and whose view of things has undergone a profound transformation. The bourgeoisie that Paz so actively despised has won the day. In fact, this sort of cultural summing up, attractive as it may be, has always stumbled on the disorderly facts of the multiplicity of individual lives. So: read this and prize it for the insights it may give into this grand thing called Mexican Civilization, but don't be disappointed when the Mexico you meet rarely corresponds.
Jun 19, Aubrey rated it really liked it Shelves: spanish , person-of-translated , antidote-think-twice-all , antidote-translated , challenges , r , nobel-prize-people , think-think-think , 1-read-on-hand , translated. Should we not grieve, however, for the ill fortune of a woman who was superior to both her society and her culture? I believe the opposite: I believe that myth and poetry are translatable, though translation implies transmutation or resurrection.
A poem by Baudelaire, translated into Spa 4. A poem by Baudelaire, translated into Spanish, is another poem and it is the same poem. Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are. Unlike is the case with many works of this breed, I cannot say that reading it earlier would have guaranteed it any higher of a rating.
For what is here is a mix of fact and fiction, opinions both credibly built up to extraordinarily incisive heights and horrendously defensive swathes of antagonism and bad faith, a deck of cards where any hand will give you both the poetical and the political, leastwise as much as slices and snapshots of that thing called life will do.
I so wanted to give five stars for the ten, even twenty star portions, but there are gaping holes that are so flagrant in their false assumptions that I'd almost call them deliberate coupled with conclusions refrained from in so deliberate a manner that I'd almost call them cowardly that I have no doubt that Paz in turn had no doubt who his intended audience was, and the fact that the few Nobel Prize Laureates are not created equal, and where the contemporaneous judges were not ruthlessly myopic, the hoards of armchair critics certainly have been tend to come away as babblingly enamored as ever shows how well he continues to gauge the status quo of readership.
I was originally drawn in by such, but adhering to it would defeat the purpose of having read this in the first place. The sadism underlying almost all types of relationships in contemporary North American life is perhaps nothing more than a way of escaping the petrifaction imposed by that doctrine of aseptic moral purity. Any contact with the Mexican people, however brief, reveals that ancient beliefs and customs are still in existence beneath Western forms.
These still-living remains testify to the vitality of the pre-Cortesian cultures. What this boils down to is, for someone like me with the ideals I have who continues to know countries across the ocean better than the one next door their homeland, this was borderline required reading. However, in the vein of my goals to build a true awareness of the 21st century in terms of what is being called "the global south" in certain sectors, this is almost an abject failure, and it will take a great deal of further work to disentangle the many instances of compassion insight that Paz demonstrates from his many instances of fatalistic, almost sadistic, "have my cake and eat it too" and general refusal to follow his arguments all the way to the bitter end.
So, an intensively incisive, plentifully well thought through, and yet at times bitterly pussyfooted collection of musings on that entity of Mexico and much of what, past, present, and potential future grounds it in reality.
I'd love to wholeheartedly love it, but Paz, above all, calls for critique as part of the process of building a more humane humanity, and so I call I can do is respond accordingly. The past returned, decked out in the trappings of progress, science and republican laws, but with a complete lack of fecundity. It could produce nothing except rebellion. Liberal thought was both a critical instrument and a utopian construction and it contained some explosive principles.
To have extended its sway would have been to prolong anarchy. The epoch of peace required a philosophy of order. Positivism offered the social hierarchies a new justification. Inequalities were now explained, not by race or inheritance or religion, but by science.
As is the case with most thinkers, Paz is best when he is concerning himself with what he has actually lived. At other times, especially at the very beginning and end, Paz was just another out of touch whiner who had found a spot alongside all the rest of the ones populating the New York Times with thinkpieces such as "Declining WASP Birthrate Must Be Because of Too Much Women Self-Confidence" and "Everyone Has the Right to Not Be Suicidal Except Sports Athletes Because I Need My Daily Dose of Action Packed Objectification", except his specialty was completely misjudging the social structure needs of young Mexican immigrants and young marginalized communities in general in the US and pretending like he knew anything about "Arabs" and "Muslims" when both the Golden Age of Islam and the Mughal Empire had somehow flown completely under his international grasp on sociopolitical history of the last years.
Sure, Paz wouldn't have been able to as easily discover works about such as I can these days on Wikipedia, but how exactly does he think that the Ancient Greek and Roman ideals, which he would have more credibly critiqued if he didn't spend so much time backhandedly fawning over them, survived the decline and fall?
Perhaps Arab translators who were paid as much as football stars earn today to rescue these Greek and Latin texts that were then rather brutally transmitted back during the European Crusades and the subsequent European Renaissance? No, surely not. That would make heroes out of those civilizations who must now take their turn as their villains of the world, lest the Eurocentric project of the last half-millennium fall absolutely to pieces.
Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve "historical normality," and the ruling classes of Mexico have no other mission to collaborate, as administrators or associates, with a foreign power. In Europe and the United States, the intellectual has been deprived of power. He lives in exile, so far as the state is concerned and wields his influence from outside the government, with criticism as his principle mission. A Mexican philosophy would have to take into account not only the ambiguity of our tradition but also that of our will-to-be, which demands recognition of our individuality but only if that recognition is joined with a universal solution to our problems.
It was also rather tragicomic to watch his constant finagling during the last few pages over how Mexico has so much potential and yet cannot hold it together, when it is almost a guarantee that, had the Mexican government pulled itself together enough to not shoot down hundreds of its own citizens, many of them students, protesting for their entirely reasonable demands for progressive reform in , the United States would have come in, as it did in many a sister Latin American country, and propped up the kind of people who would have done much worse.
This is but an example of how, if Paz had just stopped kowtowing for two seconds and followed certain lines of his own thought processes all the way through, this would be a phenomenal work that would provide the specifically Mexican blood and skin to the brains and bone of Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. The problem is, would he have won the Nobel Prize for Literature on the backs of such, and would I have become aware of him as young as I did without such?
I doubt it, and so it goes. The "advanced" nations reply very calmly that it is all a matter of "natural economic laws" over which human beings have very little control. They talk as if we were living at the beginning of the last century.
Actually, of course, the law they are talking about is the law of the lion's share. There is also the fact that private capital is not interested in the sort of investments we need: those offering long terms and accepting small profits.
On the contrary, it searches for opportunities that promise better and more rapid earnings. The capitalist cannot and will not involve himself in a general plan for economic development. Fifty pages into this, I thought I wouldn't have to bother with The Monkey Grammarian , or any of Paz' other works, as I would have come, saw, and gotten what I needed with a minimal amount of fuss.
Fifty pages before the end, I had earmarked around two to ten times as many sections for further review as I have in books twice its length, and I had to admit that, much as I wanted to throttle Paz at times, he was worth more critical attention than many writers of which there are very few these days whom I am fully on the side of.
Despite how much I imagine he'd hate to be associated with such, the form that that sort of critique which Paz holds to be the ultimate savior of humanity as sociopolitical process takes in my country today would have to be Critical Race Theory, and the fact that mainstream response to such liberals included has been nothing short of closemindedly scathing is a stronger piece of evidence than anything I could individually conjure up.
It comes down to how much time Paz spent observing the human conditions around him and tracing the basic mechanisms needs, habitus, economic sustainability in the context of who lost and who has been winning ever since, and how much time he spent pointing fingers at everyone save for the latest descendants of the ancestors who have made selfish brutality both a traditional path of righteousness and a code of honorable morality.
However, the US is not Mexico, and if there's one thing I've learned by reading this book, it's that I have decades of unpicking the contemptuous brainwashing that WASP media has subjected my brain to in regards to that country down south ahead of me, and much as the Mexican government got some ideals right back that the US is still characterizing as the devil today, so to are there sparks of hope that I'm simply not getting news of.
Are some of those sparks of hope amazingly insightful in some ways and ridiculously hateful in others as much as Paz was? Is there a chance, in this hyperconnected age of ours, that they are learning, just as I am? I hope so. Faced as we are by all this, how can we not turn away and seek another mode of development? A plural society, without majority or minorities: not all of us are happy in my political utopia, but at least all of us are responsible.
Jul 03, Kerfe rated it really liked it Shelves: essays. I like Paz's open-endedness: he can discuss the problems of Mexico and the world without dictating an ultimate solution. He knows that our world-view is a choice, a construct, and that we are lost--this is true even 60 years after the first publication of his essay.
Progress "has given us more things but not more being". He believes the task, to be able to live comfortably amidst diversity and contradiction, to allow for freedom, yet provide equality and justice, requires a different approach I like Paz's open-endedness: he can discuss the problems of Mexico and the world without dictating an ultimate solution.
He believes the task, to be able to live comfortably amidst diversity and contradiction, to allow for freedom, yet provide equality and justice, requires a different approach from those that have been used in the past.
The old answers do not work: " Paz speaks mostly about Mexican society, but places it in context, both historically and geographically. Though occasionally I got bogged down in the pages of particulars of Mexican politics, the writing itself is insightful and often poetically beautiful. I only wish he had answers as penetrating and true as the thoughtful questions he asks the reader to consider.
Sep 05, Angelin rated it really liked it. Paz writes with such clarity, his beautiful and complete prose shedding light on his homeland to the passing strangers who are the readers of the book. Yet, it is filled with ambiguities, as he leads you through the questions raised and answered, and the very character of the Mexican which is both to be and not to be. The same themes were present throughout the book, as he brought out similar ideas in different forms and essays.
In the first section of the book, the chapters were well laid-out to Paz writes with such clarity, his beautiful and complete prose shedding light on his homeland to the passing strangers who are the readers of the book. In the first section of the book, the chapters were well laid-out to bring a point across to readers progressively. However, it would have been a 5-star rating if not for the second part of the book that I thought was denser and more emotionally charged, and therefore possessed less control and clarity.
All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable transparent wall — that of our consciousness — between the world and ourselves. It is true that we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are born, but children and adults can transcend their solitude and forget themselve All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious.
It is true that we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are born, but children and adults can transcend their solitude and forget themselves in games or work. The adolescent, however, vacillates between infancy and youth, halting for a moment before the infinite richness of the world. He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own.
The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and question. Much the same thing happens to nations and people at a certain critical moment in their development.
The romantic first half of the title marks the theme; the concrete second part of the title marks the culture this theme applies to. Despite such a captivating beginning, my worry was that I would neither have the cultural background to understand the essays, nor the ardent interest to sustain me through the more philosophical or historical particulars. Part of such high praise goes to the translator Lysander Kemp in what must have been a tremendous creative effort.
In slightly more detail: The first four essays on Mexican culture are relevant to the general reader, though their relevancy decreases according to the order in which they appear in the book: The Pachuco and Other Extremes — on identity, Mexican in particular, but general too, with a stunning first page. Mexican Masks — on lying, pretending to be nobody, on what it means to be macho, or a woman.
The Day of the Dead — on the fiesta, on death, on solitude. The Sons of La Malinche — on celebrating nothingness. The last, ninth essay is The Dialectic of Solitude. What follows are a few of my favourite excerpts with brief commentary. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. The dialectic of solitude, Paz says, can make love possible.
Indeed, for him the pangs of love are pangs of solitude , and it is truth about the duality of life and death that we glimpse when we break out of our solitude and into love: In some obscure way we realize that life and death are but two phases — antagonistic but complementary — of a single reality.
Creation and destruction become one in the act of love, and during a fraction of a second man has glimpse of a more perfect state of being. But love is constrained by social disapproval and the Christian idea of sin , and with it departs a portion of our freedom: To realize itself love must violate the laws of our world. It is scandalous and disorderly, a transgression committed by two stars that break out of their predestined orbits and rush together in the midst of space.
The romantic conception of love, which implies a breaking away and a catastrophe, is the only one we know today because everything in our society prevents love from being a free choice. Love should be our goal: Love is one of the clearest examples of that double instinct which causes us to dig deeper into our own selves and, at the same time, to emerge from ourselves and to realize ourselves in another: death and re-creation, solitude and communion.
Solitude is an illness, an anomaly, and modern man remains isolated even when working: Modern man never surrenders himself to what he is doing. A part of him — the profoundest part — always remains detached and alert. Man spies on himself. Work, the only modern god, is no longer creative. It is endless, infinite work, corresponding to the inconclusive life of modern society.
In the final pages of his essay, Paz turns to the idea of time and how by abandoning the mythological, communal concept of time, we have isolated ourselves: When man was exiled from the eternity in which all times were one, he entered chronometric time and became a prisoner of the clock and the calendar.
Finally, in a most touching ending, the poet in Paz speaks up to warn us, urge us, to relearn how to dream and through those dreams reach out of our solitude toward the original, the mythical, the primal and unifying. Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. If you get a chance, read that final essay, though part of its monumental impact will remain hidden unless you also grapple with the preceding eight.
Feb 21, Leah Rachel von Essen rated it really liked it. It was more philosophy than the poetic prose I'd been led to believe it was, and so was much denser than I expected, digging into history and nationhood and the character and culture of the Mexican people. I got more out of the 'other writings' included in my volume; I believe because "Labyrinth" is, in my opinion, a bit too poetic for its own good.
It meanders, leaving it unclear where certain ideas are going; dropping them, coming back to them later; hovering happily in the abstract. The condensed lengths of the other, smaller essays in this volume force Paz to make his theses and ideas more clear. I got a lot out of "Labyrinth" in the end, but would need a reread of the difficult text to parse the more complex pieces of Paz's meanings, while in those smaller texts I learned a lot about his conclusions, from his concept of the continuous identity of Mexico to his ideas of the fundamental differences between Mexico and the United States.
Paz wrote an interesting inspection of the Mexican story with the Labyrinth of Solitude. He has crafted a meditation on the contemporary Mexican in two parts. The first part of the book discusses the cultural aspects that contribute to the Mexican as neurotic and the second part discusses the historical and political aspects that contribute to this state.
But it is important to note, this is sociological psychology; a mental health evaluation of the Mexican mind. However, Paz does not attempt an Paz wrote an interesting inspection of the Mexican story with the Labyrinth of Solitude.
However, Paz does not attempt an objective analysis for this endeavor. He acts within those very traditions in some cases unwittingly exemplifying them. For instance, Paz in nearly every breath exudes a sort of nihilistic emptiness to his observations. Also, he does not talk about dates and places like a typical western historical text. Instead, he paints the pictures in a continual progression as if a story is being told like a tale.
The cultural idiosyncrasies Paz mainly explores include language, interpersonal behaviors, and traditions that Mexicans employ. In each case, the primary result of this analysis is a pretension of self in the social world. To Paz, the contemporary Mexican hides the internal self through a series of cultural norms and expectations that tradition dictates in the same manner that a mask hides your actual expressions and intentions through the guise of your choosing.
The reason for this seems to be these traditions which are founded on false histories carried down from a culture that is not their own. This leads us to the second part of the book, the historical and cultural tumult that has lead to contemporary Mexican society. In the end, it may require less mana pool casts to reach Mana to easily duplicate grade 12 gems.
You are right on the money. This skill could increase your mana count infinitely. Battle Amulets are amulets you can win over and over, and every time you win so many amulets depending on your skill level , your mana goes up by one. This adds up very quickly, especially if the skill is maxed out, and is a worthwhile skill in the long run. I'm still not sure how to understand this.
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