Life & Wisdom Quote by Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz turns reading into a kind of sensory dare: stop treating the poem as silent print and start treating it as an instrument. The line hinges on a neat chiasmus - eyes hear, ears see - a mirrored structure that performs what it argues. You can feel the sentence folding back on itself, like a stanza with internal rhyme. Paz is insisting that poetry is not information delivery; it is perception reorganized.

The intent is partly technical, partly philosophical. On the technical side, he reminds us that poems are built out of sound even on the page: rhythm, stress, consonants grinding or gliding, vowels opening and closing like breath. Your eyes "hear" because you subvocalize; you register cadence as much as meaning. On the flip side, when you hear a poem aloud, the ears "see" because sound makes images arrive with unusual force. Not just mental pictures, but a spatial sense of a line moving, turning, landing.

The subtext is an argument against the modern habit of flattening language into pure utility. Paz, writing in a twentieth century saturated by slogans, propaganda, and mass media, defends poetry as a counter-technology: it returns words to their thickness. Coming from a Mexican poet steeped in surrealism, modernism, and translation, it also reads like a manifesto about crossings - between senses, between languages, between inner and outer worlds. The poem becomes the place where boundaries are porous and attention is fully awake.