Double Flame Love and Eroticism

" The central themes of 'The Double Flame'...are love and ardor, topics that might seem untimely for a man born at the outbreak of World War I. But the truth is that this book is a product of immense wisdom and patient observation, an approach to passion from the vantage point of maturity. In many ways the volume is a summa of Paz's amazing odyssey as an essayist, spanning more than five decades....He begins by exploring the link between poetry and eroticism, which has always been at the core of his own poetry, and then makes a sharp distinction between sex, eroticism, and love; sex, Paz claims places humans in the animal kingdom and has reproduction as its goal; eroticism is a socialized form of sexuality transfigured by our dreams; and love is altogether more abstract, at once an amatory sentiment and a concept developed during a certain historical period....In spite of its infuriating innuendos and grandiloquence, 'The Double Flame' is a tour de force--generous, engrossing, insightful, rewarding, the testament to a portentious mind, a volume about ethos by a youthful old man. Its scope helps explain, once again, why Paz, Mexican by birth and cosmopolitan by education, is this century's intellectual conscience."Paz, Octavio is the author of 'Double Flame Love and Eroticism', published 1996 under ISBN 9780156003650 and ISBN 0156003651.