Customer Reviews

Conjunctions and Disjunctions

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Politically hyper-correct work aspiring to historio-anthropo-philosopho-religio-spiritual final word on the state of the world today, written in a tedious, nebulous style typical of the "intellectual" and academic texts, heavy on the verbiage but sparse of ideas. We are obviously to be shocked by references to selected body parts, but regrettably such references had been around for too long to still have any shock value. Any thoughts which may be present are buried under classroom style erudition, based upon quotations from randomly selected books, not on the expertise of any subject. And to top it all we get a lengthy comparison of Protestant Christianity and Buddhism, based upon the premise that both are religions and both started as a break from existing religion - so there is a conjunction - but then follows a multitude of disjunctions, leading to the final conclusion that perhaps this comparison is rather meaningless. Well, so it is, as one could have seen from the very beginning, so what was the point anyhow?

The leading idea seems to be lamenting the decrepit condition of culture in the Western world. Or it may be an attempt to write a treatise on the importance of rites in the social life of humans. Perhaps it is a meditation on the conflict between the spiritual and material elements in the human nature. I was not able to extract anything substantial from this mass of casually tangled snippets of information on the Tantra, Spanish Baroque, Provencal Troubadours, Taoism, Marxism and Parisian revolt of 1968. Plus, I became quickly fatigued by the abundant repetitions.

Of course I'm aware that Paz is a poet and not an anthropologist, but then why tackle the matter which is beyond the scope of his competence? Perhaps the writing of this book was intended as anther sign of disjunctions prevalent in the West, as Paz tries to assert. Perhaps the nature of Spanish language is so different from the English that the meaning got lost in translation. Fortunately this book is very short, and one may read it as a document of ideas fashionable at the time of its writing.