100 Friday nights of solitude.

So many stories in such a small space.

The "literature" portion of my subtitle has been getting pretty lonely. Well, since I'm nearly finished with "One Hundred Years of Solitude", I might as well mention a few things (turned out to be much more than a few things).

There's been a strange dichotomy between books that go for longevity, and those that are short and sweet. Certainly, longer stories have the tendency of dragging you in. At a certain point you feel like you've grown attached to the characters and their decisions. Almost as if you have a stake in their well being and development (Fuck you Andrei Bolkonsky. Why'd you have to die?). But at the same time it's quite a time commitment, and can drag on (Like that shitty philosophical ending to "War and Peace"). Likewise, short stories have the tendency of being expedient and efficient, while at the same time giving you no emotional attachment. Short enough to get strong points in (or at least not waste too much of your time), but also too short to become a part of you.

Solitude had a fairly decent mixture of both. Shoving one hundred years into a little over 400 pages certainly seems like a rush (and at times it is), but even as your favorite characters (that you just got to know) get thrust around by the vicissitudes and vagaries of life, you can't help but relate to them. Part of the reason is that Marquez, in the middle of these paroxysms of change, goes into extreme depth to give you a deep understanding of each character. Then, he goes through the painstaking process of beating the shit out of any warm and fuzzy predictions or hopes you might have had. Oh, you like the humble, motherly, innocent, and caring nature of Remedios Moscote, and the pensive and devoted nature of Aureliano Buendia? Happy that they got married? Want to see them live happily ever after? Go FUCK yourself.

But it's amazing at the same time. You feel the impact of each twist, and as much as you'd want to change it, you wouldn't dare. Each incident seems so necessary to this long concatanation of events that the slightest change could destroy the grand scheme.

But that's not at all anything new. Stories like that are a dime a dozen. Where does this differ? It has a magical charm that only someone deeply infatuated (indoctrinated?) with third world superstitions could construct. There are flying carpets, there are 17 brothers who are magically marked with indelible ash, there are ghosts, there are humans that transcended earthly life and death, there are men and women who defy the limits of size and shape and beauty and intelligence and honor and so on. There are strange deaths that have no suspects other than the ripping of the fabrics of time and space under the heavy strain of importance and magic that surrounds the once unassuming town of Macondo.

And this is what makes this story so nostalgic. When the giant Jose Arcadio was killed by a gun that was never found, and a murderer who may not have existed, his blood drained all the way through the town only to stop at his mother who, after disowning him years earlier, rushed to find the body of her son.

 Just look how a story like this develops. He wasn't a large man. He wasn't a bigger than average man. He was a giant that redefined what was humanly possible. He wasn't killed by another human being, or a disease. He was mysteriously and magically killed by a bullet that was never found, and that never pierced him. The blood didn't stop at his door, it drained all throughout the town to find his mother.

This reeks of a genuine story that, through the process of exchanging ears and tongues and through tiny nuances of detail became so over-exaggerated that it's sole purpose was to one-up any challenger and at the same time grab your emotions and conventions so that they could be beaten savagely. And that's why it's so nostalgic. You haven't heard stories like these since you were a child and that strange Uncle that you're still not sure you're related to told it to you for the sole purpose of exciting awe and wonder. And through that blissful ignorance the world seemed so unpredictable and strange. As if you could never get to the bottom of it completely, and instead of being dissuaded or discouraged, you feel invigorated that you live in a dynamic and capricious world that will never fail to surprise or excite or destroy you in the most poetic and meaningful ways possible.

And I believe all of this was intentional. Looking back for a quote I liked (I bleed for you ungrateful fucks), I finally realized what it meant. I'll give you it in it's entirety, since I'm no good with words:

"Aurelianio Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.

'What's happening,' she sighed, 'is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here anymore.'"

The world of the old days, as told by ancient and sometimes anonymous sources, was not moved and shaped by gods and demi-gods and heroic beings and magic. Those interpretations were by naive, fallible, and fanciful people who had no clue how the world worked, and their interpretations clung tenaciously through perpetuity until arriving generations were smart enough to know better. This is that painful moment you realize that all of this is a gigantic allegory of changing times and beliefs. It's not that times are less magical, or the world is coming to an end. It's that now we know differently. It's not that giants and beauties used to walk the Earth, but that they never did. It's not that the world seemed less magical as you grew up, but rather you were gullible and stupid enough to fall for superstitious fairy-tales, and as you learned and grew you stopped wasting your time with misleading fables meant for children. No matter how happy they used to make you. Now you realize that the world isn't unpredictable. It moves like clockwork, and the only sort of youthful awe you get out of it are strange stories like this that grab you and, despite your better judgements, force you to forget about truth and logic and facts, and instead tempts you with the disingenuous, the apocryphal, and most importantly the divine and absurd.

I need a drink.

Oh, and I'll give Gabriel the last word to sum everything up.

Smile, but go fuck yourself.