I close the book while chanting the last few words aloud (spoilers!) for me and for the ghosts of reading past: “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” I let the words leap back and forth from page to tongue to brain, and I wonder if the pronouncement is only true for earthly fictions; or, if maybe, plots about Luna dwelling races get better odds in Mercury.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a time machine.
When I was thirteen, this book (my favorite of all books) took me to prose full of floating fishes and blind leeches (that mistook a wrinkled back for a wall). On this day, decades after fishes and leeches, we went on our umptieth trip and ended up on a page where “Human beings are not born once and for all... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” No wonder humanity is always screaming and pushing, pushing, pushing… for better (one hopes).- as suggested in the piece, the quotations are bits from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that always transports me to interesting pages.
- for Poets and Storytellers United (Weekly Scribblings #30: Writing as a Metaphor for Living). Write new poetry or prose which includes 3 or more of the following words: allusion, conflict, edit, fiction, grammar, mood, pace, plot, poetry, prose, punctuation, rhythm, and stanza. I went with fiction, plot, and prose.
the beginning of a reading journal project (which did not quite survive *cough*)
