Octavio Paz, Mexico’s Everyman

Mexico mourns the death of Octavio Paz, its poet laureate and most celebrated man of letters. A brilliant and insightful essayist, Paz was a powerful voice in society, questioning his country’s often heavy-handed authority and urging its citizens to think critically about personal and national choices.

Throughout his life, Paz, 84, was a champion of democracy in Mexico and all of Latin America. Probing the essence of the Mexican soul, Paz wrote “The Labyrinth of Solitude” in 1950, a book whose point of departure is a reflection on the differences between Mexico and the United States and whose lessons are as fresh today as when they were published.

More acutely than any other Mexican writer, Paz ventured into hitherto unknown corners of Mexico’s colonial past. For example, he wrote a memorable essay on Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz, a 17th century philosopher, poet and nun who lived a short and intense life that ended in a convent surrounded by books. His recognition of this woman’s great intellect was a historical and feminist landmark.

Described by some critics as a leftist turned conservative, Paz in fact was a democratic spirit who rebelled against all social injustice. And in a time when it was not fashionable for a Latin American intellectual to question the assumptions of Marxism, he exposed the false prophets who cozily adhered to its social and economic doctrines.

Few deeds illustrate better his moral strength than the decision in the fateful year of 1968 to resign as Mexican ambassador to India after the Oct. 2 “Tlatelolco massacre,” the bloody suppression of student protesters in the shadow of Mexico City’s Olympic Games. He said he could not serve an authoritarian regime.

Paz was a cultural Everyman, the sort that every country treasures. Ranging with ease from literary criticism and political analysis to art, anthropology and culture, his keen mind raised questions that triggered the Mexican imagination. Love and freedom were the two words that kept him alive. “Love,” said Paz in an interview with The Times three years ago, “belongs to the realm of freedom. . . . Not at all times, but for one moment, for one instant of reciprocity.”