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.
I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.
Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall
Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
Because something or someone looks or acts differently from us does not necessarily mean that it is ugly or bad.
But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
It's never been true, not anywhere at anytime, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.