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.
Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.
Thoughtfulness is the way to deathlessness, thoughtlessness the way to death. The thoughtful do not die: the thoughtless are as if dead already.
We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.
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