The Labyrinth of Solitude

Society denies the nature of love by conceiving of it as a stable union whose purpose is to beget and raise children. . . . Every transgression against this rule is punished. . . . (In Mexico the punishment is often fatal if the transgressor is a woman, because . . . we have two sets of morals: one for the "senor," another for women, children and the poor) (199).

Paz is a poet and a social thinker, and his picture of human nature and the Mexican character is full of original images. Paz has a clear idea of what the life of humanity should be about. He writes of the "very meaning of all human activity, which is to assure the operation of an order in which knowledge and innocence, man and nature are in harmony" (27).

The "solitude" of the title of the book is a state which humanity finds itself in as a result of the "collapse" of "universal order" (26). This is a collapse which Paz says cannot be stopped from happening in human consciousness.

In other words, a human being believes that there is order in the universe. Then, at some point in the development of that human being, he or she stops believing in that universal order. The world seems to be more and more complicated and my

. . .
The entire book in some way is related to this solitude, how it came about, and ways that the Mexican (as well as the North American and other Latin Americans) tries to deny it or cope with it or escape it. Paz is honest about his view that Mexicans do not live a completely real life, because of colonialism, because of poverty, and other reasons. At the same time, he sometimes argues that Mexicans live more real and complete lives than North Americans. Some of these arguments are startling. For example, Paz argues that murder for a Mexican is more real and more connected to life than murder for a North American. Death, says Paz, is more a part of life for the Mexican than for the North American. He writes of "the perfection of modern crime" in North America, and says "derives from the contempt for life which is inevitably implicit in any attempt to hide death away and pretend it does not exist" (60). On the other hand, When the Mexican kills---for revenge, pleasure or caprice---he kills a person, a human being. Modern criminals and statesmen do not kill: they abolish. They experiment with beings who have lost their human qualities. . . . Murder is still a relationship in Mexico, and in this sense it has the same liberating
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 1679
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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