PAZ, Octavio

El laberinto de la soledad / The Labyrinth of Solitude

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All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence a something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall -- that of our consciousness -- between the world and ourselves. It is true that we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are born, but children and adults can transcend their solitude and forget themselves in games and work. The adolescent, however vacillates between infancy and youth, halting for a moment before the infinite richness of the world. He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness , he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question.

But the adolescent cannot forget himself – when we succeed in doing so, we are no longer an adolescent – and we cannot escape the necessity of questioning and contemplating ourselves.

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, Las trampas de la fe / Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith

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"If there is such a thing as a feminine temperament, in the most arresting sense of the word, it is that of Sor . She fascinates us because the most extreme oppositions come together in her without ever completely blending. Perhaps this is the secret of her compelling vitality: few beings are as alive as she -- after being buried for centuries.

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I believe that modern psychological theories have merely replaced a set of fantastic principles (humors, stars, spirits, affinities, and antipathies) with others no less fantastic (complexes, compulsions, the unconscious, archetypes). In a certain way, psychology today is nothing more than a translation of Renaissance psychology into modern scientific terms.

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the admirable coherence and unity of those poems show that they were a response to her psychological and intellectual circumstances -- her cloistered life and character -- and her need to transcend those circumstances and to justify her life and her vocation...The obstinacy with which she insisted on being herself, her skill and her tact in surmounting obstacles, her fidelity to her inner voices, the secret and proud pertinacity that allowed her to bend without breaking, none of this was rebellion -- impossible in her time and her situation -- but it was (and is) an example of intelligence and will in the service of internal freedom

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Her house became as large as the world because it held a library and a collection of rare objects from the four corners of the earth....A realm at once spatial and temporal, concrete and imaginary; a realm in which the world, transformed into a collection, lost its hostility, reduced to a series of random and marvelous objects. The collection neutralized the world, turned it into a toy. She could admire each of these objects, venerate it as a center of magnetic radiation, caress it like a lover, rock it like a child, study it, take it apart, or throw it out the window.

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