Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Dialectic of Solitude


I have a love/hate relationship with school: on the one hand, I hate the stress and the late nights and the blood, sweat and tears, but on the other hand, I am absolutely LOVING the enlightenment! I don't know why anyone would want to study anything outside of the Humanities--this is where it's at my friend. In Humanities of Latin America, I'm reading the Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz; it is definitely something to meditate over.


"Solitude--the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself--is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature--if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "NO" to nature--consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.


The feeling that we are alone has a double significance: on the one hand it is self-awareness, and on the other it is a longing to escape from ourselves."

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