Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.
Interpretation
Memory influences our lives beyond our control, shaping our perceptions and experiences.
This quote highlights the paradoxical nature of memory: while it aids us in understanding our past and forming our identities, it also deceives us by presenting a version of reality that may not be entirely accurate. Cortazar suggests that our memories operate independently of our conscious thought, weaving a complex tapestry of experiences that influences us in hidden ways.
In practice
During a lecture on the nature of consciousness, one might reference this quote to illustrate the complexity of human memory.
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.
No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.
The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
They put the thing down your throat so you don't swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That's what was recommended in Rockland State Hospital to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can't read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again.
For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.
We would rather see those to whom we do good, than those who do good to us.
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