Death and birth are solitary experiences

 Solitude - the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alien­ated from the world and oneself - is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel them­ selves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" him­ self by saying "No" to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion.

Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
The foetus is at one with the world around it; it is pure brute life, unconscious of itself. When we are born we break the ties that joined us to the blind life we lived in the maternal womb, where there is no gap between desire and satisfaction. We sense the change as separation and loss, as abandonment, as a fall into a strange or hostile atmosphere. Later this primitive sense of loss becomes a feeling of solitude, and still later it becomes awareness: we are condemned to live alone, but also to tran­ scend our solitude, to re-establish the bonds that united us with life in a paradisiac past. All our forces strive to abolish our soli­tude. Hence the feeling that we are alone has a double significance: on the one hand it is self-awareness, and on the other it is a longing to escape from ourselves. Solitude - the very condition of our lives - appears to us as a test and a purgation, at the conclusion of which our anguish and instability will vanish.

At the exit from the labyrinth of solitude we will find reunion ( which is repose and happiness ), and plenitude, and harmony with the world.

Popular language reflects this dualism by identifying solitude with suffering. The pangs of love are pangs of solitude. Com­munion and solitude are opposite and complementary. The redemptive power of solitude clarifies our obscure but vivid sense of guilt: the solitary man is "forsaken by the hand of God." Solitude is both a sentence and an expiation. It is a punishment but it is also a promise that our exile will end. All human life is pervaded by this dialectic.

Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.
Does death mean a return to the life that precedes life? Does it mean to relive that prenatal life in which rest and motion, day and night, time and eternity are not opposites? Does dying mean to cease existing as a being and finally, definitively, to be? Is death the truest kind of life? Is birth death, and is death birth? We do not know. But although we do not know, our whole being strives to escape the opposites that torment us.

Everything - self-awareness, time, reason, customs, habits -tends to make us exiles from life, but at the same time everything impels us to return, to descend to the creative womb from which we were cast out. What we ask of love ( which, being desire, is a hunger for communion, a will to fall and to die as well as to be reborn ) is that it give us a bit of true life, of true death. We do not ask it for happiness or repose, but simply for an instant of that full life in which opposites vanish, in which life and death, time and eternity are united. In some obscure way we realize that life and death are but two phases - antagonistic but complementary - of a single reality. Creation and destruc­tion become one in the act of love, and during a fraction of a second man has a glimpse of a more perfect state of being.

from the book Labyrinth of Solitude Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz