The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Interpretation
Books can serve as a form of escape, leading readers to focus on their enjoyment rather than the potential negative impacts.
In this quote, Julio Cortazar suggests that readers often become engrossed in the pleasure a book brings, much like a user might relish the effects of opium. Rather than critically engaging with the content or exploring its implications, they might discuss the superficial qualities of the book, paralleling how drug users might prioritize the drug's pleasurable effects over its detrimental consequences. This reflection raises questions about the nature of literature and its effects on the reader's mind, often encouraging escapism at the cost of deeper understanding.
In practice
In a discussion about the effect of modern literature on society, this quote can highlight the dual nature of escapism offered by books.
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened - as if somebody was trying to demote them.
In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.
If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.
We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.
That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.
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