Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 22:23:44 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 23:54:31 GMT Content-length: 1386 Octavio Paz on the North Americans The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas, are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature. This sort of conspiracy cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions. Spontaneity avenges itself in a thousand subtle or terrible ways. The mask that replaces the dramatic mobility of the human face is benevolent and courteous but empty of emotion, and its set smile is almost lugubrious: it shows the extent to which intimacy can be devastated by the arid victory of principles over instincts. The sadism underlying almost all types of relationships in contemporary North American life is perhaps nothing more than a way of escaping the petrification imposed by that doctrine of aseptic moral purity.

Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad.

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