Octavio Paz - The Dialectic of Solitude

[Victor]

I was reading his book of essays, Labyrinth of Solitude, and came across "The Dialectic of Solitude." I definitely recommend reading it, as it applies to both men and women. This passage covers a lot, Paz is an amazing writer.

Octavio Paz - The Dialectic of solitude

...In our world, love is an almost inaccessible experience. Everything is against it: morals, classes, laws, races and the very lovers themselves. Woman has always been for man the "other," his opposite and compliment. If one part of our being longs to unite itself with her, another part - equally imperious - rejects and excludes her. Woman is an object, sometimes precious, sometimes harmful, but always different. By converting her into an object and by subjecting her to the deformations which his interests, his vanity, his anguish and his very love dictate, man changes her into an instrument, a means of obtaining understanding and pleasure, a way of achieving survival. Woman is an idol, a goddess, a mother, a witch or a muse, as Simone de Beauvior has said, but she can never be her own self. Thus our exotic relationships are vitiated at the outset, are poisoned at the root. A phantasm comes between us, and this phantasm is her image, the image we have made of her and in which she clothes herself. When we reach out to touch her, we cannot even touch unthinking flesh, because this docile, servile vision of a surrendering body always intrudes. And the same thing happens to her: she can only conceive herself as an object, as something "other". She is never her own mistress. Her being is divided between what she really is and what she imagines she is, and this image has been dictated to her by her family, class, school, friends, religion and lover. She never expresses her femininity because it always manifests itself in forms men have invented for her. Love is not a "natural" thing. It is something human, the most human trait of all. Something that we have made ourselves and that is not found in nature. Something that we create - and destroy - every day.

These are not the only obstacles standing between love and ourselves. Love is a choice...perhaps a free choosing of our destiny, a sudden discovery of the most secret and fateful part of our being. But the choosing of love is impossible in our society. In one of his finest books - Mad Love - Breton has said that two prohibitions restrict it from the very outset: social disapproval and the Christian idea of sin. To realize itself, love must violate the laws of our world. It is scandalous and disorderly, a transgression committed by two stars that break out of their predestined orbits and rush together in the midst of space. The romantic conception of love, which implies a breaking away and a catastrophe, is the only one we know today because everything in our society prevents love from being a free choice.

Women are imprisoned in the image of masculine society has imposed on them; therefore, if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of jail break. Lovers say that "love has transformed her, it has made her a different person." And they are right. Love changes a woman completely. If she dares to love, if she dares to be herself, she has to destroy the image in which the world has imprisoned her.

A man is also prevented from choosing. His range of possibilities is very limited. He discovers femininity as a child, in his mother or sisters, and from then on he identifies love with taboos. Our eroticism is conditioned by the horror and attraction of incest. Also, modern life stimulates our desires excessively, while it also frustrates them with all sorts of prohibitions: social, moral, even hygienic. Guilt is both the spur and rein of desire. Everything restricts our choice. We have to adjust our profoundest affections to the image of what our social group approves of in a woman. It is difficult to love persons of other races, cultures or classes, even though it is perfectly possible for a light-skinned man to love a dark-skinned woman, for her to love a Chinese, for a "gentleman" to love his maid. And vice versa. But these possibilities make us blush, and since we are prevented from choosing freely, we select a wife from among the women who are "suitable." We never confess that we have married a woman who we do not love, a woman who may love us, perhaps, but who is incapable of being her true self. Swann says: "And to think that I have wasted the best years of my life with a woman who was not my type." The majority of modern men could repeat that sentence on their deathbeds. And with the change of one word, so could the majority of modern women.

[Francois Tremblay]

This is very good. I will have to post it on my blog.