On Monday morning I got a call from a friend who covers the United States for La Jornada, the left-leaning but independent newspaper that is essential reading in Mexico. He told me Paz had died. "My editor wants me to get reactions from his intellectual counterparts in the states," he said. The results of our brainstorming were pathetic, and they lead me to two depressing realizations. 1) There are no intellectuals in the United States. No one, at least, with anything like Paz's breadth or even the tiniest fraction of his public stature in Mexico. 2) I bet that except for a handful of poets, what candidates there are for the title of leading American intellectual would hardly have a thing to say about Paz. They'd know who he was, of course. But I doubt they've read him, for the simple reason that he wrote most often about Mexican subjects, and Mexico is low on the list of subjects educated Americans feel they need to know about.