The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Interpretation
Books can serve as a form of escape, leading readers to focus on their enjoyment rather than the potential negative impacts.
In this quote, Julio Cortazar suggests that readers often become engrossed in the pleasure a book brings, much like a user might relish the effects of opium. Rather than critically engaging with the content or exploring its implications, they might discuss the superficial qualities of the book, paralleling how drug users might prioritize the drug's pleasurable effects over its detrimental consequences. This reflection raises questions about the nature of literature and its effects on the reader's mind, often encouraging escapism at the cost of deeper understanding.
In practice
In a discussion about the effect of modern literature on society, this quote can highlight the dual nature of escapism offered by books.
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
And write whatever Time shall bring to pass_x000D_ _x000D_ With pens of adamant on plates of brass.
Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.
Let every man recognize what he is, and be certain that we are all equally priests, that is, we have the same power in the word and in any sacrament whatever.
We're in business to relieve human suffering, to help feed the poor, to provide education and culture - but above all else, we're concerned with the relief of human suffering.
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
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