Octavio Paz

Certainty

Certainty - meaning Summary

Consciousness Between Parentheses

The poem explores the fragile boundary between perception and existence. The speaker questions whether sensory details—the lamp's light, the writing hand, the reader's eyes—are truly real, and notes how words dissolve as soon as they are spoken. This uncertainty produces a tense awareness: life is experienced only transiently, "between two parentheses," a brief interval of consciousness framed by vanishing language and doubt.

Read Complete Analyses

If it is real the white light from this lamp, real t he writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.

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