Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Geometry

Each land is a society: a world and a vision of the world and the otherworld. Each history is a geography and each geography is a geometry of symbols. India is an inverted cone, a tree whose roots are fixed in the heavens. China is an immense disc - belly and navel of the cosmos. Mexico rises between two seas like a huge truncated pyramid: its four sides are the four points of the compass, its staircases are the climates of all the zones, and its high plateau is the house of the sun and the constellations. It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves that to the people of antiquity the world was a mountain and that, in Sumer and Egypt, as in Mesoamerica, the geometric and symbolic representation of the cosmic mountain was the pyramid. The geography of Mexico spreads out in a pyramidal form as if there existed a secret but evident relation between natural space and symbolic geometry and between the latter and what I have called our invisible history.

- Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude

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