. Spinning .

I am feeling clownish and ridiculous in my interpretations, unworthy of analysis of this great book that I in ignorance somehow justify in applying to my own small self.  My thoughts are amateur and self-serving, and I am missing the bigger picture, the history, the meaning.

In focusing on the characters, I see their strength, and yet it is difficult to understand them.  I am beginning to doubt my perception and comprehension of them as people, but have not as yet discovered their secret, what they represent in Marquez’s mind as well as in those of higher intellect that perhaps have shared this wisdom and simple searching on our new web of life’s information would indeed repair my broken window and present the view.

"The house was suddenly filled with unknown guests, with invincible and worldly carousers, and it became necessary to add bedrooms off the courtyard, widen the dining room, and exchange the old table for one that held sixteen people, with new china and silver, and even then they had to eat lunch in shifts."

The train, the odd Mr. Herbert and his love of the bananas, the outgoing and lusty Aureliano Segundo, have all brought to Macondo a drastic change by welcoming an inflow of people from all over the world.  Amaranta is scandalized.  Fernanda is humbled.  Colonel Aureliano Buendia goes deeper into the cave of his workshop.  But Ursula simply buys more food, accomodating the different tastes of the foreigners who descend upon her home. 

These are no longer simple people with an unreal ability to adapt to upheaval of their lives that rivals the absurdities of Candide.  They stand for more than I am reading into them.  My friend Neha may be right in her assessment of character as vehicle of a greater meaning.  But I am at a loss to peel off their clothing and see the nakedness for what it is.

"Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague.  She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more inpenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities.  She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home."

I like Remedios for her innocence and free spirit.  She cuts off her flowing hair and shaves her head.  Still, she is even more irresistible to men.  She has the lack of emotion of all the Buendias, yet remains ignorant of her powers, and while she adapts as easily as the rest, it is a leap ahead she takes to retain her self, plotted out to protect her own private sphere of solitude.

How can my feeble efforts to understand her, to understand those around her, around me, have any value to any but myself?  What am I missing in my box of tools of reading?  Am I using a hammer to smash a bubble instead of using a pin?

Admittedly there are realities that have kept me from breezing through this novel at a quicker pace, but those same realities are simultaneously changing my perception of what I am reading.  Just as a reader brings the past to his interpretation, he is affected by the present and so instills his reading with new, constantly changing and updated ideas. 

At this point in my days, 100 Years of Solitude is perhaps the perfect selection to be involved in.  I read sporadically but daily, and do not cover many pages at a time.  But the added time load assigned to a reading is taken instead by reflection, application, understanding.  I must go back and pull excerpts to illustrate my analysis and thought process (and will do so shortly), but I find myself trying to comprehend the Buendia family just as I am now doing with my own.  I feel I am missing the whole point of the novel, perhaps, by trying to imbue the characters with emotions that upon consideration and replay, are not clear except to cubicleize them into separate chunks of ice.  Will they form together an igloo I wonder? 

We are never told by Marquez how any of them feel.  We are told what they do.  The character I felt closest to was Jose Arcadio Buendia, and with his death, I feel alone.  Ice-olated.

I had been wondering about the ice that fascinated Jose Arcadio Buendia when the gypsies brought it to Macondo.  And the reference to it in the first sentence of the novel.  I am not satisfied that it had no more meaning than the eventual good fortune it brought his grandsons, although it did neatly provide an obvious reason for the railroad to be brought in, and all it brings with it.  As an aside, it did remind me of East of Eden, and Cal’s bright idea to move lettuce quickly by refrigerated cars, which of course, was a dismal failure and practically sealed his doomed efforts to prove himself to his father.

Today, I feel the ice brings more the coldness of bitter feelings, of empty starkness and immobility.  The protective bubble that is solid and inpenetrable while thought and feeling hangs suspended within.  It is insulation and distance.  I understand the ice.  It is just one more manner of solitude that disillusionment and helplessness can bring.

There is no doubt that with one hundred years to play with, Marquez need be a master at timeline in sequential, foreshadowing, backplay (my own term), and tieing everything in so that it runs as smoothly and accurately as a…well, clock.

This was just too good not to share with you:  The Buendia family is doing well in the ice business (remember Jose Arcadio Buendia’s great scheme when the gypsies brought a chunck of ice?)  Well, two things are going on:  One, Aureliano Triste decided they need to expand the business and leaves to seek the railroad coming through Macondo; two, Aureliano Centeno (another ash-crossed illegitimate son of Aureliano) has returned to help in the ice factory, and this is his contribution:

"Aureliano Triste consulted the calendar and left the following Wednesday, planning to return after the rains had passed.  There was no more news of him.  Aureliano Centeno, overwhelmed by the abundance of the factory, had already begun to experiment with the production of ice with a base of fruit juices instead of water, and without knowing it or thinking about it, he conceived the essential fundamentals for the invention of sherbet."

Don’t you just love it?  There’s Jose Arcadio Buendia surviving in the great unknown space of his grandson.  Sherbet for God’s sake! 

But Marquez brings back Aureliano Triste and spans the missing eight months he is gone in a matter of a few sentences, moving quickly to what becomes a major change in the village of Macondo, and I am sure, in the Buendia family–or maybe they don’t change all that much…

"At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration.  During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they throught it was some new trick of the gypsies, coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journey-man geniuses of Jerusalem.  But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late."

Lord, the ghosts of Jose Arcadio, Melquiades, and all the rest must be laughing their asses off.

But the thing is, is that while recalling the men from the past, Marquez brings them into the present with the spirit and ideas of the sons.  And at the same time, while moving so very quickly through the present, gives us a hint of a future that will see rapid change, growth, maybe good, maybe evil.  All this, in a single event, a single catalyst:  A moving train of endless cars…like endless rooms.

The terms solitude or solitary have been coming at me fast and furious, no longer hinted at by Marquez, but given us with small examples:

"Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with soitude.  He would get up at five in the morning after a light sleep, have his eternal mug of bitter coffee in the kitchen, shut himself up all day in the workshop, and at four in the afternoon he would go along the porch dragging a tool, not even noticing the fire of the rose bushes or the brightness of the hour or the persistence of Amaranta, whose melancholy made the noise of a boiling pot, which was perfectly perceptible at dusk, and he would sit in the street door as long as the mosquitoes would allow him to.  Someone dared to disturb his solitude once.

"How are you, Colonel," he asked in passing.

"Right here," he answered.  "Waiting for my funeral procssion to pass."  (p. 216)

So we are getting the feeling of the solitude, the aloneness each member of this odd family feels and surrounds himself with as what, protection?  Or is it just a lack of social skill, a lack of understanding each other and thus, never developing a community with mankind, but standing outside of the touch-zone while walking daily within it for a lifetime.

One of Aureliano’s seventeen sons, Aureliano Triste, marked by the ash cross on his forehead as his brothers, decides to remain in Macondo.  In seeking a separate house for himself, he stumbles upon the rundown home of Rebeca and Jose Arcadio and finds Rebeca an old woman still alive but long since forgotten by all but Amaranta, who still holds a grudge over Pietro Crespi.  Rebeca chases away Aureliano Triste with a gun, and while the family feels she should be brought into their home to be taken care of, she is adamantly resistant:

"…but his good intentions were frustrated by the firm intransigence of Rebeca, who had needed many years of suffering and misery in order to attain the privileges of solitude and who was not disposed to renounce them in exchange for an old age disturbed by the false attractions of charity."  (p. 236)

This is one of the most telling incidents of solitude, and one I am beginning to well understand.  It is a state of mind well sought in a life filled with disappointments or traumatic and painful events that seem beyond our control, when one can no longer understand the workings of the mind and feels helpless to gain insight or benefit, yet is reluctant to accept.  There develops a need to disassociate, an acknowledgement that true understanding could indeed threaten whatever balance the mind has managed to create for itself.  It would just be too much; total loss of control appears inevitable.  This bubble that must be built is drawn, as a wand from soapy water, as first an invisible illusion, exclusion, inclusion of space.

I see the building of the house of solitude as then formed with a framework of chickenwire.