In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • How and Why I Wrote the Labyrinth of Solitude: An Elucidation
  • Octavio Paz (bio)
    Translated by Jason Wilson (bio)

Many times have I been asked this question: Why, what for, and for whom did I write The Labyrinth of Solitude? There are many answers. The simplest and most direct lies in my infancy. Three moments in my childhood marked me forever, and everything that I have written about my country has been no more, perhaps, than an answer to those experiences of childhood vulnerability. A tirelessly repeated answer and, each time, different. The first experience is also my first memory. How old was I? I don’t know, maybe three or four years. I remember vividly the place: a small, square room in a grand old house in Mixcoac. My father “had gone to the revolution,” as was said then, and my mother and I took refuge with my grandfather, Ireneo Paz, family patriarch. The turmoil of those years had forced him to leave the city and move to his country house in Mixcoac. I lived and grew up in that village, but not always in the same house, apart from a short stay in Los Angeles. I left it just after reaching my twenty-third year. The house still stands and is today a convent. Not long ago I paid a visit and could hardly recognize it: the nuns had turned the bedrooms and garden into cells and the terrace into a chapel. It doesn’t matter: the image stays with me, as do the sensations of wonder and vulnerability.

I see myself—or, better still, I see a blurred figure, a childlike bulk lost in a huge round sofa of threadbare silk, placed right in the middle of the room. In a fixed way, light falls from a high window. It must be five in the afternoon, for the light is not intense. The walls are papered in a faded yellow, with drawings of garlands, stalks, flowers, fruits: emblems of boredom. All is vivid, too vivid; all alien, closed in on itself. A door gives on to the dining room, another on to a drawing room, and the third, at the side and with stained glass, on to the terrace. The three are open. The room was used for breakfast. Drone of voices, laughter, clatter of dishes. It is a holiday, celebrating a saint’s day or a birthday. My older cousins rush out to the terrace. There is a coming and going of people, who pass the bulk by without stopping. The bulk cries. For centuries he has been crying, and nobody hears. He is the only one to hear his wail. He is lost in a world that is both familiar and remote, intimate and indifferent. It is not a hostile world: it is a strange world, although familiar and everyday, like the garlands on the impassive wallpaper, like the laughter from [End Page 60] the dining room. Interminable moment: hearing myself cry amid universal deafness. . . . I do not remember more. Obviously, my mother calmed me down: woman is the door that reconciles us with the world. But the sensation has not been wiped out and never will be. It is not a wound but a hollow. When I think of myself, I touch it; when I feel myself, I feel it. Alien always and always present, it never leaves me, a dumb, invisible, bodiless presence, constant witness to my life. It does not talk to me, but I, at times, hear what its silence tells me: that afternoon you began to be yourself; when you discovered me, you discovered your absence, your hollow; you discovered yourself. You now know: you are lack and quest.

The ups and downs of the civil war led my father to the United States. He settled in Los Angeles, where there was a numerous colony of political exiles. A little later my mother and I followed him there. Soon after our arrival my parents decided that I should go to the neighborhood kindergarten. I was six years old and didn’t speak a word of English. I vaguely recall the first day of class: the school with its American flag...

Share