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The North American System Only Wants To Consider The Positive Aspects Of Reality. Men And Women Are Subjected From Childhood To An Inexorable Process Of Adaptation Certain Principles, Contained In Brief Formulas Are Endlessly Repeated By The Press, The Radio, The Churches, And The Schools, And By Those Kindly, Sinister Beings, The North American Mothers And Wives. A Person Imprisoned By These Schemes Is Like A Plant In A Flowerpot Too Small For It He Cannot Grow Or Mature.

-Octavio Paz

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The North American System

Octavio Paz

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The North American System Only Wants To Consider The Positive Aspects Of Reality. Men And Women Are Subjected From Childhood To An Inexorable Process Of Adaptation Certain Principles, Contained In Brief Formulas Are Endlessly Repeated By The Press, The Radio, The Churches, And The Schools, And By Those Kindly, Sinister Beings, The North American Mothers And Wives. A Person Imprisoned By These Schemes Is Like A Plant In A Flowerpot Too Small For It He Cannot Grow Or Mature.

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Tradition Is No Longer A Continuity But A Series Of Sharp Breaks. The Modern Tradition Is The Tradition Of Revolt.

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The Ideal Of A Single Civilization For Everyone, Implicit In The Cult Of Progress And Technique, Impoverishes And Mutilates Us

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Love Is The Revelation Of The Other Person's Freedom.

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I Sat At The Foot Of A Huge Tree, A Statue Of The Night, And Tried To Make An Inventory Of All I Had Seen, Heard, Smelled, And Felt: Dizziness, Horror, Stupor, Astonishment, Joy, Enthusiasm, Nausea, Inescapable Attraction. What Had Attracted Me? It Was Difficult To Say: Human Kind Cannot Bear Much Reality.

If We Are A Metaphor Of The Universe, The Human Couple Is The Metaphor Par Excellence, The Point Of Intersection Of All Forces And The Seed Of All Forms. The Couple Is Time Recaptured, The Return To The Time Before Time.

To Love Is To Battle, To Open Doors, To Cease To Be A Ghost With A Number Forever In Chains, Forever Condemned By A Faceless Master; The World Changes If Two Look At Each Other And See.

Social Criticism Begins With Grammar And The Re-establishing Of Meanings.

We Pursue Modernity In Her Incessant Metamorphoses Yet We Never Manage To Trap Her. She Always Escapes: Each Encounter Ends In Flight. We Embrace Her And She Disappears Immediately: It Was Just A Little Air. It Is The Instant, That Bird That Is Everywhere And Nowhere. We Want To Trap It Alive But It Flaps Its Wings And Vanishes In The Form Of A Handful Of Syllables. We Are Left Empty-handed. Then The Doors Of Perception Open Slightly And The Other Time Appears, The Real One We Were Searching For Without Knowing It: The Present, The Presence.

Enormous And Solid But Swaying, Beaten By The Wind But Chained, Murmur Of A Million Leaves Against My Window. Riot Of Trees, Surge Of Dark Green Sounds. The Grove, Suddenly Still, Is A Web Of Fronds And Branches.

Death Is The Mother Of Forms.

Watching I Watch Myself, What I See Is My Creation As Though Entering Through My Eyes Perception Is Conception Into An Eye More Crystal Clear Water Of Thoughts, What I Watch Watches Me, I Am The Creation Of What I See

The Woman Who Died Night After Night And Her Dying Was A Long Goodbye, A Train That Never Left.

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