Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey

Poet Octavio Paz has journeyed across much of the twentieth century landscape in this short book of essays. As a son of La Malinche (see his LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE), he maintained a clearheaded sense of balance while his contemporaries were losing their heads over communism, surrealism, existentialism, and all the other isms that characterized that time. What has always amazed me that Paz was at one and the same time both a truthsayer and a poet. Even to someone like myself whose Spanish is less than idiomatic, his poetry possesses a beauty and limpidity that are almost never met in combination. Only Emily Dickinson of the poets I know has this quality. One of my favorites is the poem "Epitafio sobre ninguna piedra" from which the title of this review is taken.Now that communism is all but extinct, one forgets that only a short while ago it held so many intellectuals in thrall. Looking at our situation today, Paz concludes that "if I am sure of one thing it is that we are living an interregnum; we are walking across a zone whose ground is not solid; its foundations, it basis has evaporated. If we wish to climb free from the marsh and not sink into mud we should quickly work out a morality and a politics." I think that, as a people, we have not. I am reminded of Yeats's "The Second Coming": The best lack all convictionWhile the worst are full of passionate intensityA final word: Toward the end is a beautiful little essay entitled "Imaginary Gardens: A Memoir" which, while responding negatively to a proposal for a public park, lets loose a Proustian flood of memory regarding the past of the town where Paz was raised, Mixcoac. This little book, which can be read in a single sitting, deserves a wide readership. I loved it and feel impelled to seek out more of Paz's work.

This is NOT an autobiographical essay, although you might suppose so after the opening story of his exile to California and then later back to Mexico where he was treated as a stranger. This episode serves more as a kernel from which grows his political and social education and experience. Paz briefly traces his political growth from childhood to maturity, through Mexico, the Yucatan (which he points out is so very different from the rest of Mexico), Paris, Spain, India, etc... The editor does his best to provide background history, but be warned that Paz assumes you have the same strong knowledge of Mexican history that he does. I though the highlight was his piercing conclusion about the evil in ourselves, "Evil is human, exclusively human. But not all is evil in humans. Evil nests in their awareness, in their freedom. In there also lies the remedy, the answer to evil... to fight evil is to fight ourselves. And that is the meaning of history."The writing is clear throughout -- Paz writes well in prose form as well as poetry. A bit hard to follow sometimes, but aren't all intellectual journeys?

The agile synthesizing mind at the height of its powers: Skip the 'Labyrinth' and go straight to this.