ASK A MEXICAN
¡ASK A MEXICAN!
Published: August 15, 2012
"Death is present in our fiestas, our games, our loves and our thoughts," wrote Octavio Paz in his 1950 classic The Labyrinth of Solitude. "To die and to kill are ideas that rarely leave us. We are seduced by death."
But before you cite Paz — along with Aztec human sacrifice, cockfighting, bullfighting and the front pages of Tijuana tabloids — as proof of our inherent blood lust, Muerte Man, consider this: Isn't there something honorable about living in the presence of death, something valuable, even, in remembering our mortality? Why relegate death to cemeteries as gabacho Protestants do? Why forget those who passed before us? Again Paz: "The cult of life, if it is truly profound and total, is also the cult of death, because the two are inseparable. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life."
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