Octavio Paz grew up in a crumbling house in Mixcoac with a grandfather's library for a father and blue eyes that made him a foreigner in his own country. His real father — a revolutionary lawyer who chose the bottle over his family — died under the wheels of a train when Octavio was twenty-one. That absence shaped everything that followed: the poetry, the diplomacy, the restless need to name what Mexico was and what he was inside it.

His first marriage to Elena Garro — herself a brilliant writer whose manuscripts he reportedly pressured her to burn — was a long war neither could win. His second, to Marie-Jose Tramini, gave him the stability to write his masterwork from a distance: The Labyrinth of Solitude, a book that told Mexico truths it had been afraid to say aloud. When the government massacred students at Tlatelolco in 1968, Paz resigned his ambassadorship in a single gesture that cost him his career and defined his conscience.

This is the story of a man who built himself from other people's books, watched his own library burn, and spent a lifetime mapping a solitude he could never quite escape.

• (00:00) - The Apartment on the Left Bank