Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that language can reveal deeper truths that traditional definitions cannot fully encapsulate.
Julio Cortazar highlights the complexity and richness of language, arguing that the playful use of words allows for insights into reality that rigid definitions in dictionaries fail to capture. Wordplay opens up meanings and interpretations that engage our imagination and intellect, challenging us to think beyond what is typically understood and encouraging a deeper understanding of the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the philosophy of language.
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.
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 donβt 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.
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
Human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled; they are four dimensional - body, mind, heart, and spirit.
I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain β¦ In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
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