NONFICTION - April 30, 1995

THE DOUBLE FLAME by Octavio Paz (Harcourt Brace: $22; 276 pp.) This book begins and ends with what Paz calls the “idea of the human person.” From it comes love, the desire for completeness; civilization, political and social reform. Paz gives us the ingredients of earthly love: Obstacle and transgression, breaking taboos; domination and submission; fate and freedom, body and soul, and yes, exclusivity. The book pivots on Paz’s discourse on 12th-Century courtly love, love as a “superior ideal of life.” It is here, also, that love is revealed as subversive, the thing that transports and separates us from all that is soul-killing in civilization. It binds us to an ideal of life that is not always in evidence in our daily lives. And it is a phenomenon that is not possible without a soul. As for eroticism, it makes, by comparison, a cameo appearance: “Sex, eroticism, and love are aspects of the same phenomenon, manifestations of what we call life.” Eroticism, Paz writes, “is invention.” We lose our bodies in another body. “Without a soul . . . there is no love, but neither is there love without a body. Through the body love is eroticism and thus communicates with the vastest and most deeply hidden forces of life. Both love and eroticism--the double flame--are fed by the original fire: sexuality.” Paz has cogitated deeply to recombine these aspects of our lives, torn asunder as they are in modern times. To see them all together, under the roof of his rich and vital mind, is to remember what it is like to believe in love.