In The Labyrinth

I've started to re-read Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth Of Solitude, both in English and in the original Spanish, partly for relaxation and partly in preparation for a trip to Mexico I'm making next month. Even the book's early pages contain some remarkable reflections on differences between Mexico and the United States, those two countries that lie so close together yet are so different in cultural, geographical, spiritual and psychological terms. I'm particularly struck by this characterization of contrasts, which corresponds to what I've observed myself:

The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins. He has been influenced at one time or another by France, Spain, the United States and the militant indigenists of his own country, and he crosses history like a jade comet, now and then giving off flashes of lightning. What is he pursuing in his eccentric course? He wants to go back beyond the catastrophe he suffered: he wants to be a sun again, to return to the center of that life from which he was separated one day. (Was that day the Conquest? Independence?) Our solitude has the same roots as religious feelings. It is a form of orphanhood, an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All, and an ardent search: a flight and a return, an effort to re-establish the bonds that unite us with the universe.

Nothing could be further from this feeling than the solitude of the North American. In the United States man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world and it is built in his own image: it his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows. His creations, like those of an inept sorcerer, no longer obey him. He is alone among his works, lost - to use the phrase by José Gorostiza - in a "wilderness of mirrors".