Prologue

Out there, where the frontiers end, roads are erased. Where silence begins. I go forward slowly and I people the night with stars, with speech, with the breathing of distant water waiting for me where the dawn appears.

I invent evening, night, the next day raising from its bed of stone, the clear eyes of that day running across a world painfully dreamt. I sustain tree, cloud, rock, sea, the joy foreseen, inventions that vanish and hesitate before the light dispersed.

After that, the arid mountain, the adobe village, acute small reality of a puddle and one stolid peppertree, of some idiot children who stone me, a rancorous people which denounces me. I invent terror, hope, noon - father of solar frenzy, of glittering fallacies, of women that castrate their men of the hour.

I invent the burn and the howl, masturbation in latrines, visions in a dunghill, prison, lice, the chancre, the riot of soup, informers, viscous animals, low connections, interrogations at night, the inquiry into conscience, the judge, the victim, the witness. You are all three of them. To whom will you appeal now and with what sophistries will you annihilate the accuser? Petitions, appeals, allegations, all useless. Useless to knock on condemned doors. They are not doors, but mirrors. Useless to close one's eyes or to go back among men: this lucidity will never leave me. I will smash the mirrors, shatter my image to fragments - that each morning, mercifully, my accomplice, my accuser, himself recreates. - Solitude of consciousness and consciousness of solitude, day with its bread and water, night without water. Aridity, the country ravaged by a lidless sun, a frightful eye, oh consciousness, pure present where past burn with neither brilliance nor hope. Everything leads into this eternity which leads nowhere.

Out there, where the roads are erased, where the silence ends, I invent despair, the mind that conceived me, the hand that designed me, the eye that discovered me. I invent the friend who invented me, my semblant; and woman, my contrary: tower crowned by me with banners, wall that my surf climbs, ruined city slowly reborn under the domination of my eyes.

Against silence and noise I invent the Word, freedom that invents itself and invents me every day.

--Octavio Paz, from Freedom and the Word