Poet Octavio Paz has journeyed across much of the twentieth century landscape in this short book of essays. As a son of La Malinche (see his LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE), he maintained a clearheaded sense of balance while his contemporaries were losing their heads over communism, surrealism, existentialism, and all the other isms that characterized that time.
What has always amazed me that Paz was at one and the same time both a truthsayer and a poet. Even to someone like myself whose Spanish is less than idiomatic, his poetry possesses a beauty and limpidity that are almost never met in combination. Only Emily Dickinson of the poets I know has this quality. One of my favorites is the poem "Epitafio sobre ninguna piedra" from which the title of this review is taken.
Now that communism is all but extinct, one forgets that only a short while ago it held so many intellectuals in thrall. Looking at our situation today, Paz concludes that "if I am sure of one thing it is that we are living an interregnum; we are walking across a zone whose ground is not solid; its foundations, it basis has evaporated. If we wish to climb free from the marsh and not sink into mud we should quickly work out a morality and a politics." I think that, as a people, we have not. I am reminded of Yeats's "The Second Coming":
The best lack all conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity
A final word: Toward the end is a beautiful little essay entitled "Imaginary Gardens: A Memoir" which, while responding negatively to a proposal for a public park, lets loose a Proustian flood of memory regarding the past of the town where Paz was raised, Mixcoac.
This little book, which can be read in a single sitting, deserves a wide readership. I loved it and feel impelled to seek out more of Paz's work.