7 / /-A PZ9 ±.K3 The Labyrinth of Solitude The Labyrinth of Solitude Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz Translated by Lysander Kemp GROVE PRESS, INC. NEW YORK EVERGREEN BOOKS LTD. LONDON Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved Originally published in 1950 by Cuademos Ameri¬ canos, Mexico, and revised and expanded in 1959 for the second edition published by the Fondo de Cul- tura Economica, Mexico, under the title El Laberinto de la Sole dad. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-11777 Ninth printing Manufactured in the United States of America The other does not exist: this is rational faith, the incur¬ able belief of human reason. Identity = reality, as if, in the end, everything must necessarily and absolutely be one and the same. But the other refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists; it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth. Abel Martin, with a poetic faith as human as rational faith, believed in the other, in “the essential Heterogeneity of being,” in what might be called the incurable otherness from which oneness must always suffer. —Antonio Machado