Octavio Paz on modernity

I’ve quoted Octavio Paz a couple of times, and here he is once more: this time I pick from his dense and wide-ranging Nobel speech. The theme that ties it all together all is that elusive creature, modernity. What does Paz have to say? Consider, first, his thoughts on the connection between tradition and modernity:

I am not sure whether this unexpected historical lesson has been learnt by all: between tradition and modernity there is a bridge. When they are mutually isolated, tradition stagnates and modernity vaporizes; when in conjunction, modernity breathes life into tradition, while the latter replies with depth and gravity.

So much in the world today is attributed to that supposed fissure between the two - and one seems to step on the foot of the other. But as Paz notes eloquently at the end of his speech, modernity is evanescent, not easily grasped; it is startling; it can use the very, very ancient to produce the new:

In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

It's a rather dramatic piece of prose - I've noticed in other essays too that Paz takes such flights - but his message couldn't have been more accurate.