{"id":4416,"date":"2023-10-05T03:29:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-05T07:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/octavio-paz-on-freedom-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-10-05T03:29:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-05T07:29:29","slug":"octavio-paz-on-freedom-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/octavio-paz-on-freedom-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Octavio Paz on Freedom \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"Octavio<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,\u201d James Baldwin admonished as he considered how we imprison ourselves<\/a>, for he knew just how limited our freedom is and how illusory our choices<\/a>. And yet we must move through the world with a feeling of freedom, necessary for our sense of agency, for making our existential helplessness bearable, for making our lives of consequence. More than that, freedom \u2014 the sense of it, no matter the fact of it \u2014 must be at the center of our being, if we are to be. Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s understood this when she insisted that freedom \u201cmust remain a quality of the mind or spirit not dependent on circumstances, a gift of grace.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

That is what Octavio Paz<\/strong> (March 31, 1914\u2013April 19, 1998) explores throughout The Double Flame<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his uncommonly insightful inquiry into love as \u201ca knot made of two intertwined freedoms,\u201d<\/a> at the center of which is his insistence that \u201cthere is an intimate, causal relation between love and freedom,\u201d that freedom is the fundamental necessity of being. <\/p>\n

And yet the entire premise is haunted by the abiding question of what place freedom can possibly have, as Paz himself recognizes, \u201cin a universe governed by immutable laws\u201d \u2014 the same disquieting question at the heart of the paradox of free will<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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