Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that language can reveal deeper truths that traditional definitions cannot fully encapsulate.
Julio Cortazar highlights the complexity and richness of language, arguing that the playful use of words allows for insights into reality that rigid definitions in dictionaries fail to capture. Wordplay opens up meanings and interpretations that engage our imagination and intellect, challenging us to think beyond what is typically understood and encouraging a deeper understanding of the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the philosophy of language.
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.
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 donβt 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're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.
I think there's a large worry in queer communities about imitating straight people, when queerness has its own identity and maybe can be a radical force that should be dismantling stuff that locks people into structures.
It is good to have an intellectual awareness of our dependence upon God - to understand how great He is and how very small we are in His sight.
Your believing or not believing in karma has no effect on its existence, nor on its consequences to you. Just as a refusal to believe in the ocean would not prevent you from drowning.
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.