In awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Mexico's Octavio Paz, the Swedish Academy of Letters has chosen well, selecting a poet, philosopher and essayist of formidable intellect and talent whose work ranks among the very best produced during this century. To describe Paz merely as an eminent writer, however, would be to unfairly limit him. Paz is a diplomat, journalist and belletrist, a man who has moved with equal ease in foreign embassies, literary salons and the volatile world of Mexican political journalism. Any criticism must be partial.
Impartial criticism is for academics.
I was a journalist. It is a great exercise to have to write something every day. Much of Paz's poetry makes the point that people cannot integrate themselves until they learn how to relate to others, how to love. Because of this, the multiplication of forced labor camps and the threat of atomic extermination are inseparable from the crisis of love in the 20th century. They are symptoms of the same illness.