100 years of solitude

Currently reading Gabriel Garcia's Marquez's '100 Years of Solitude.' It's about the rise and fall of a family and their town. I am overly impressed by Marquez's ability to tell a story. I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' about a year ago. I don't remember a day within those two weeks of reading that book were I put it down after a chapter or two without feeling satisfaction, like a good meal. It was a story of repressed unextishable love, secret love and expectations. Even though it was in the end, a love story, there are all these elements of mystery, of suspense and action. There were days we cheered on the hero and days where we sympathized with his opponet.

I wonder sometimes as I read these stories, could his charecters really exist in this world with that type of enviable passion? Can Florentino Ariza's repressed love for Ferma Daza burn on, mature and yet after 50 years, still burn like the teenagers they were when they had first sat on that bench. She marries a doctor, he waits the half a century, after her husbands death, to repeat his vows. Can charecters be defined by one thing? I find it unbelievable, but yet, I envy them. In the world of literature, they have to exist. Maybe envy is not the right word. I admire them.

We need these stories to create our own stories. Life happens and we have to make sense of it through myths and poems. We watch leaves fall and poetically they fall for us. We watch sunsets and it's like the sun is their for you. We turn all these externals into our own personal story. If we didn't have these stories, all we would really have a series of empty events with empty reactions. It is what seperates us from animals. It's not fake. The human mind wants to make sense of things. Things happen poetically because it a natural inclination.

The Red Sox had to beat the Yankees in high drama inorder to earn their rights as world champions and to end an 86 year drought. 86 Also means to throw out, deject, discard. Names after a bar in the Village called Chumley's bar and restaurant at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. They would refuse to serve customers who were to drunk and threw them out. 86 them. Like the Red Sox threw out the curse.

These are the signs we look for, this poetic happenings to really believe that there is something more then ourselves.

It's more then a reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that brought on this thought. It's always a girl, isn't it? And yes it is. How did you do it Florentino Ariza?