Time & Perspective Quote by Julio Cortazar

Cortazar turns the Garden of Eden into an accusation: not against theology, but against our chronic refusal to live in the unglamorous present. The line’s power is in its stack of verbs - invent, live submerged, make up, propose - each one a small act of fraud we commit against reality. Eden isn’t remembered here; it’s fabricated, a retroactive alibi for dissatisfaction. By framing paradise as something we had to invent, Cortazar suggests the “loss” is less historical than psychological: we need a myth of before to explain why now feels insufficient.

The question isn’t really seeking an answer. It’s an interrogation of modern consciousness, especially in Latin America’s 20th-century churn of coups, revolutions, and imported ideologies. Utopias and “a future for ourselves” sound aspirational, but Cortazar’s syntax makes them feel like coping mechanisms, the mind’s way of bargaining with instability. Nostalgia becomes a kind of drowning: “submerged” implies passivity, even self-sabotage, as if longing is easier than agency.

There’s also a sly jab at politics and art alike. Utopia is both the grand project of movements and the private fantasy of individuals; Cortazar groups them with Eden to imply they share a comforting structure: an elsewhere that relieves us from the hard work of inhabiting what is. His intent isn’t to kill hope so much as to expose how often our “future” is just another beautifully packaged escape hatch.