Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.
Octavio PazRead
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
Interpretation
True love requires selflessness and an ongoing exploration of reality.
In this quote, Octavio Paz expresses the idea that surrendering oneself fully to love is a challenging endeavor that only a few people achieve. True love is depicted not just as possession or a fixed state, but as a dynamic process of continuous discovery and engagement with the truth of existence, emphasizing how love evolves and deepens over time.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the nature of love in a relationship seminar.
Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
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.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
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.
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
Now they are a circle, and they vibrate together, they pulsate together. Their hearts are no longer separate, their beats are no longer separate, they have become a melody, a harmony. It is the greatest music possible, all other musics are just faint things compared to it, shadow things compared to it.
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.
We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.
If you can learn to love yourself and all the flaws, you can love other people so much better. And that makes you so happy.
Even if my fellow man has proven faithless time after time, I can at least retain a hope that he will improve, pray for him, and think kindly without frustration and disappointment.
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
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