NP but Cortazar and the binary IF Interested.

[Mark Kohut]

In a fascinating chapter of the marvelous HOPSCOTCH there is this:
Our protagonist, Oliveira, is a young man in his 20s; he has family money
which his brother sends
him along with long letters about his irresponsibility and not taking his
place
in society.

He is having a torrid affair--"he was not in love so the desire would
end"--with
a woman who is at one with life, so to reduce her characterization (which
is beautifully
expressed in a long sentence with four or so ways of stating that---this
style of Cortazar's
so endearing, always thickening the observations, the analogies, the
everything, stroke after stroke).
Here's one later bit about her: She hit the bullseye all the time like the
Zen archer but she did not
even recognize the method...nice, huh?...

but he reflects on entering society---on Doing [my word]---vs this pure
Being [MK]--"behind
every action there is a protest" and this intellectual reflection on the
possibility, on the fact
that he can be (and IS) self-divided, is where, I think Cortazar suggests,
the either-or, the binary, the law of the excluded middle begins:  "At some
given point the callus, the sclerosis, the definition is born: black or
white, radical or conservative, homo,-or heterosexual, the San Lorenzo team
or the Boca Juniors, meat or vegetables, business or poetry."----and this
continues, all interpretative ambiguity in full swing---"And it was all
right, because the species should not trust people like Oliveira; his
brother's letter was the precise form of that rejection".
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