the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality; and the moment I say that, the moment I w… - Octavio Paz
" "the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality; and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness: the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it, I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it: the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities; the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted: between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?
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About Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano (31 March 1914 – 19 April 1998) was a poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate.
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Octavio Paz Lozano
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Additional quotes by Octavio Paz
no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we; our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or you or he, the self is neither mine nor yours, it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses? are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write? we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction, we come and go: the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things, no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write, inexact expressions once again: I began, I write, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write: who is writing what I am reading?
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