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Today We All Speak, If Not The Same Tongue, The Same Universal Language. There Is No One Center, And Time Has Lost Its Former Coherence: East And West, Yesterday And Tomorrow Exist As A Confused Jumble In Each One Of Us. Different Times And Different Spaces Are Combined In A Here And Now That Is Everywhere At Once.

-Octavio Paz

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Today We All Speak,

Octavio Paz

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Today We All Speak, If Not The Same Tongue, The Same Universal Language. There Is No One Center, And Time Has Lost Its Former Coherence: East And West, Yesterday And Tomorrow Exist As A Confused Jumble In Each One Of Us. Different Times And Different Spaces Are Combined In A Here And Now That Is Everywhere At Once.

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Art Is What Remains Of Religion: The Dance Above The Yawning Abyss.

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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.

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Solitude Is The Profoundest Fact Of The Human Condition. Man Is The Only Being Who Knows He Is Alone.

I Thought That The World Was A Vast System Of Signs, A Conversation Between Giant Beings. My Actions, The Cricket's Saw, The Star's Blink, Were Nothing But Pauses And Syllables, Scattered Phrases From That Dialogue. What Word Could It Be, Of Which I Was Only A Syllable? Who Speaks The Word? To Whom Is It Spoken?

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

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Love Is Born At First Sight; The Friendship Of A Frequent And Lengthy Exchange.

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Love Is An Attempt At Penetrating Another Being, But It Can Only Succeed If The Surrender Is Mutual.

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There Can Be No Society Without Poetry, But Society Can Never Be Realized As Poetry, It Is Never Poetic. Sometimes The Two Terms Seek To Break Apart. They Cannot.

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Literature Is The Expression Of A Feeling Of Deprivation, A Recourse Against A Sense Of Something Missing. But The Contrary Is Also True: Language Is What Makes Us Human. It Is A Recourse Against The Meaningless Noise And Silence Of Nature And History.

Man Does Not Speak Because He Thinks; He Thinks Because He Speaks. Or Rather, Speaking Is No Different Than Thinking: To Speak Is To Think.

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Erotic Acts Are Instinctive; They Fulfill A Role In Nature. The Idea Is Familiar, But It Is One That Contains A Paradox: There Is Nothing More Natural Than Sexual Desire; There Is Nothing Less Natural Than The Forms In Which It Is Made Manifest And Satisfied.

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Poetry, In The Past, Was The Center Of Our Society, But With Modernity It Has Retreated To The Outskirts. I Think The Exile Of Poetry Is Also The Exile Of The Best Of Humankind.

What Distinguishes Modern Art From The Art Of Other Ages Is Criticism.

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Poet: Gardener Of Epitaphs.

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

Wisdom Lies Neither In Fixity Nor In Change, But In The Dialectic Between The Two.

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Poetry Is Not Truth, It Is The Resurrection Of Presences.

Whatever Is Not Stone Is Light

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

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

The Purpose Of Poetry Is To Restore To Mankind The Possibility To Wonder.

It May Seem Paradoxical To Say That We Have Been Expelled From The Present, But It Is A Feeling We Have All Had At Some Moment. Some Of Us Experienced It First As A Condemnation, Later Transformed Into Consciousness And Action. The Search For The Present Is Neither The Pursuit Of An Earthly Paradise Nor That Of A Timeless Eternity: It Is The Search For A Real Reality.

Surrealism Is Not A School Of Poetry But A Movement Of Liberation... A Way Of Rediscovering The Language Of Innocence, A Renewal Of The Primordial Pact, Poetry Is The Basic Text, The Foundation Of The Human Order. Surrealism Is Revolutionary Because It Is A Return To The Beginning Of All Beginnings.

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