Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.
Interpretation
Memory influences our lives beyond our control, shaping our perceptions and experiences.
This quote highlights the paradoxical nature of memory: while it aids us in understanding our past and forming our identities, it also deceives us by presenting a version of reality that may not be entirely accurate. Cortazar suggests that our memories operate independently of our conscious thought, weaving a complex tapestry of experiences that influences us in hidden ways.
In practice
During a lecture on the nature of consciousness, one might reference this quote to illustrate the complexity of human memory.
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.
You ought not to be rude to an eagle, when you are only the size of a hobbit, and are up in hid eyrie at night!
Soon all of you immortals Will be as dead as we are! Come on then, what are you waiting for? Have you run out of thunderbolts?
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one.
There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it.
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
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