Contemporaries Of All Mankind
We are, for the first time in our history, contemporaries of all mankind.
Paz wrote this near the end of The Labyrinth of Solitude, his 1950 meditation on Mexican identity, composed after years as a young diplomat living in Paris and India. He had spent the book tracing how conquest and isolation shaped a private, wounded sense of self in his country, and in these final pages he turns that history toward the present moment. Rather than mourning what has been lost, he insists the old separations between peoples and eras have collapsed, leaving everyone standing together at the same historical threshold. For Paz this is the ground of beginning again: solitude ends not in the past but in the shared, unfinished present each person wakes into.
Reflection
Paz believed solitude no longer separates people from each other but connects everyone as contemporaries. What common ground do I share with someone I already plan to see today?