nostalgia

Want to write before I forget. And it is quiet here.

Finished Solitude.

Struck by its beauty. Its sadness. Its passion. Its solitude.

A few lines that sealed it for me.

p. 407. His memory began to grow sad. That process of nostalgia was also evident in the pictures.

Thinking about pictures now. And what they are.

p. 408. One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

Does he mock sentimentality or embrace it? Do I have permission to miss that which I have already experienced?

p. 408. In the postcards he sent from the way stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem: the chimerical Negroes in the cotton fields of Louisiana, the winged horses in the bluegrass of Kentucky, the Greek lovers in the infernal sunsets of Arizona, the girl in the red sweater painting watercolors by a lake in Michigan who waved at him with her brushes, not to say farewell but out of hope, because she did not know that she was watching a train with no return passing by.

Makes me realize how in love with images I am. The fleeting color of a moment.

p. 409. It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.

Sounds like something I have read before.

p. 415. ...the age-old war between man and ant.

p. 417. ...dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches...

p. 417. It was the tail of a pig.

p. 420. Wouded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persitence of the spiderwebs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn.

Again. Images.

p. 420. The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

p. 422. ...speaking mirror.

p. 422. ...for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men...because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

"What is the book about," he asked me in coffee shop last Saturday.

She said, "memory, butterflies, ice" (I think. It makes me nervous to quote people. And the bar was loud.)

I agree.