In his essays, the Mexican poet, 1990 Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz reflects on many pressing and modern topics and seeks answers to “eternal” questions: about the loneliness of the so-called civilized person, about the peculiarities of the colonial era, about the nonlinearity of time, about the modern art - and above all about painting and poetry - and about the culture and beliefs of the Aztecs, about the nature of poetic language, about the deep dissimilarity of eroticism and sexuality and about the similarity of eroticism and poetry, about the ideologization of Dostoevsky and the rationality of the Marquis de Sade - and about much more.< /p>