"The Mexican Dream"

[fiefoe]

J. M. G. Le Clezio subtitled it "The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations", but actually the first half of the book was mostly about that dreadful interruption.

• It is that fatality which gives the conquistadors' adventure its tragic grandeur... How could they have saved themselves, those Indians who formed but a whole, a single and same soul controlled by their gods.. when there appeared before them the individualistic, skeptical man of the modern world?
• Without that magical world, without the ritual languor of the Indian nations, without the splendor of that condemned civilization, Hernan Cortés would have been only a bandit at the head of gang of adventurers.
• The first of the Conquerors, the Spaniard Diego de Ordaz, climbed the Popocatépetl volcano, and from atop its crater, 5,450 meters high, he discovered the extraordinary landscape of the valley of Mexico, its huge lake, its floating gardens, its white cities connected by causeways.
• (Cortés)sent messengers to the coastal town of Veracruz to get a long chain of wrought iron which he had brought along in his ships for a purpose. The chain was intended to make the great chiefs of the Mexican army his prisoners.
• a dust cloud of nations with strange names, almost all of which are gone today
• This is surely the most profound meaning of memory. Through the voice of the Conqueror who destroyed it, that civilization could express for men of all time that which was once its life, its language, its laws, and its gods.

The Amerindians vs. the Europeans:

• We see expressed in the disillusioned words of the military surgeon James Roberts: The Indians would "become civilized just as soon as they became money lovers."
• But unlike the Europeans, whose science was outside religion, the Amerindian astronomers conceived of a system that was entirely dedicated to the cults of the gods.
• For the ancient Mexicans, as the world had not been ordered according to man's understanding, it could not be in his image. There was something quite profound in the Amerindian religions' refusal of anthropomorphism, a refusal the Western system could not accept,
• For the hunting-gathering peoples agriculture was an infraction of the laws of nature, particularly when it was practiced as a means for enrichment and erected barriers preventing the the free movement of men and game. .. the idea of land ownership was what most differentiated the Amerindians from the Europeans.
• The Indians could not enter into the system of the exploitation of goods, and condemned themselves to exile in the poorest and most inaccessible regions of the continent:
•  Finally, the respect for natural forces, the search for an equilibrium between man and the world might have been the necessary braking of technological progress in the Western world. {Maybe now I'll listen to "Colors of the Wind" with a new ear...}