I have just made love to a book. Now in the afterglow, I reach for the cigarettes I once smoked, remembering their phantoms and contemplate the sum of human life while I drink my coffee without sugar as the Buendías, breathing the aroma of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
My wife has been pushing me to read the novel for years. My reticence had little to do with the book’s location on the literary stage. I knew it was a great book before I ever picked it up. However, life just got in the way. There was always something catching my fancy that seemed wildly more important–a trait I found exemplified through the generations of Buendias.
Each turn of the page, I found parallels within my own life. The stories that I share about my family seem just as magical as the impossibilities experienced by the Buendías in their fantastic town of Macondo. Stories like the time one of my brothers set out in the middle of winter to catch salamanders only to return home five minutes later with a dark spotted creature he found tucked underneath the first log he lifted up. The same brother could whisper fish onto a bare hook tied to a line wrapped around his fingers.
Or of the wild romance of my wife and I who came together out of the shambles of her failed marriage with two children and my failed engagement, somehow weaving together into a family that survived four years in the heart of Hell managing a newspaper after running away from a man living next door who had placed me on a hitlist ten years prior.
The same Hell where we lived in a home without heat, temperatures in the negatives outside, fighting a losing battle to the mice who had conquered the kitchen cabinets. When we finally escaped, we purchased the house of our dreams only to see our fortunes shattered and everything we once held dear ripped from us until all we had left were the scraps of scattered memories and our stories.
And while I am not naive enough believe that my experience in life is the same as others, I do truly think that all families and communities have their own insomnia plagues and secret stories that bind them in the fabric of a shared reality, where it does not matter what was real, only what is remembered. Perhaps, that is truly the meaning of life, which I believe is what Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece is all about. In the end, we are only the stories we leave behind.
Which reminds me of another great book, which is also a great movie, and this quote.
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
What will your verse be?
Beachpoet 