Life & Wisdom Quote by Julio Cortazar

Cortazar is baiting you with a paradox and then refusing to untangle it. The line turns on a sly double use of "absurdity": one is the ambient, inescapable condition of modern life, the other is a chosen posture, an act. If the world is already irrational, "living reasonably" can become a kind of collaboration: you accept the rules of a game that never made sense. Cortazar's provocation is that the only exit from a bad script is improvisation so radical it looks like nonsense to anyone still committed to the script.

The intent feels less like existential despair than a writerly tactic for survival. Cortazar, a key figure of the Latin American Boom and a master of playful form (Hopscotch is basically a novel that dares you to reorganize it), understood that systems - political, social, even narrative - trap people by pretending to be coherent. "Infinite absurdity" hints at bureaucracies, ideologies, routines: loops that regenerate themselves. To "break out" requires a counter-logic: pranks, leaps, refusals, reordering the sequence, choosing the unapproved option.

Subtext: absurdity isn't just a mood; it's a method. Live absurdly and you puncture the trance, expose the scaffolding, reclaim agency. The line flatters rebellion, but it also warns: the way out won't be clean or respectable. It will look ridiculous. That, for Cortazar, is the point.