I feel secretly smug being 70, like I know something the youngsters don't. I'm in the big kids club! I am older than Putin, Angela Merkel & I forget who else. Didn't I used to be the youngest just the other day? It's rather confusing & reading The Bow & the Lyre doesn't totally help, when Paz finishes several pages of argument with sentences like this:
Our condition consists in not being identified with anything in which it is incarnated, but also in not existing except by being incarnated in that which is not itself.
I don't think it would help to know what "it" is. Nonetheless, I'm loving his belief in poetry ~ I feel like I read this book when I was 14 & it determined the course of my life, which it did except I'm only reading it now.