Great countries are those that can endure history’s convulsions without abandoning their efforts to solve their problems at home.
-Albert Camus
Author: Benn Bell
QOTD
Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.
– Horace Mann
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is unlike any novel I have ever read. This is the third novel I have read by this author. From the very first line one is enchanted by the magical realism the writer imposes on the material. It is said that Garcia Marquez found his voice as a result of being raised by his grandmother in Aracataca, a small village in Colombia. This village is the basis for the mythical town of Macondo from the novel. His grandmother would tell him tell him the most fantastic stories in the most off hand way as if they were true. He adopted this style while telling the tale of the Buendia family. Marquez was also greatly influenced by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Traces of surrealism can be found throughout the novel.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an easy novel to read. It is about the Buendia family dynasty that began with the founding of the small mythical town of Macondo. Marquez chronicles the rise and fall of the town and the family over a one hundred year period. Some of the characters actually live to be over 100 years old. What is so confusing is that each character’s name is a variation of the family name Buendia: Jose Arcadio Buendia, Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio, Aurliano Jose, Ursula, Remedios, and Amaranta. Well, you get the idea. These names repeat over six generations. You really couldn’t keep them straight. My approach to reading the novel was not to even try keep all the characters and events straight in my mind as I was reading, but rather to let the words wash over me and by the end a tapestry was woven from them wherein I could make sense of the whole. The idea, I think was to represent the repetition and the cyclic nature of life. In fact the whole novel could be described as a metaphor for human society and a running commentary on human nature.
The novel is biblical in nature and scope. It mimics many characters and events from the Bible such as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Moses in the bulrushes, and the great flood. One character even ascends to heaven.
The famous opening line of the novel is a good example of the style of the entire novel: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This story is not revisited again until much later in the novel and in fact is two stories; one where Aurliano Buendia discovers ice and the other where he faces the firing squad. The novel careens back and forth between past, present, and future at will and with great ease, interweaving personal narratives of the characters and the epic sweep of the history of the town and the country. This includes a civil war between the liberals and conservatives, a banana company (United Fruit) exploiting the town, and a labor war resulting in the massacre of 3,000 workers.
I wondered as I was reading the novel just what Marquez meant by the one hundred years was and what did the solitude represent? By the time I got to end I knew. As previously mentioned some of the characters actually lived 100 years. The sweep of history regarding the town and its inhabitants was roughly 100 years. Throughout the novel Marquez make numerous references to the solitude of the characters, from each other and from society at large. And, as John Leonard said in his 1970 review: “Solitude is one’s admission of one’s own mortality and one’s discovery that the terrible apprehension is itself mortal, dies with you, and must be rediscovered and forgotten again endlessly.” I am also reminded of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
I highly recommend this acclaimed novel written in 1967. In my opinion it is one of the best written in the 20th century and one that put Marquez firmly on the road to winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The title “For Whom The Bell Tolls” is taken from a poem written by John Donne wherein he makes the claim that because of our common humanity, every death necessarily diminishes each of us, therefore, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. This is a book about death and dying set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
Hemingway’s novels and stories present a certain kind of hero: “The Code Hero.” This individual lives by his own code and struggles gracefully and bravely against death and annihilation. Another consistent theme found in Hemingway is courage under fire or dire circumstances, whether it is in the bull ring, behind enemy lines, or hunting man-eaters in the green hills of Africa. Cowardice is particularly loathed.
The novel begins in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War and takes place over a four day period. The chief protagonist is an American named Robert Jordon who has been tasked to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines in the Spanish mountains. He is aided in this task by a band of guerrillas headed by Pablo and the woman of Pablo, Pilar. We also meet the beautiful Maria. A young Spanish girl whose parents were murdered by Fascists soldiers who then raped and abused Maria. Some say that Maria represents Spain and her gang rape represent the despoilage of Spain by the Fascists.
Robert and Maria fall in love at first sight. This is another recurring theme to be found in Hemingway, that humans can find salvation through romantic love. The couple makes love together in Jordon’s sleeping bag on the ground outside the mouth of the cave where they are all hiding. He asks Maria “Did the earth move for thee?” This is the earliest I have seen this terminology in print and is now considered a cliché, but it may be that Hemingway coined this usage.
Hemingway’s use of language was controversial in this novel. Many Spanish words and phrases were translated literally word for word which gave a sense of the Spanish but sounds archaic and stilted to our English hearing ears. For example, the Spanish characters in the novel referred to each other as thee and thou. The traditional second person singular in English is “thou/thee/thy”. The most exact way of translating “tu” from Spanish is “thou” or “thee”. This was a bold experiment. Once the convention was understood and accepted one got used to and even grew to like it.
During the course of the novel many flashbacks and digressions take place as various characters tell their stories and reminiscence about the past. We learn, for example, that Jordon’s Grandfather was a Civil War hero in the America’s war of rebellion. We also learned that his father was a coward and that he shot himself to death with a pistol. It is indeed ironic that Hemingway’s own father committed suicide and that Hemingway took his own life with a shot gun many years later.
Death is the primary focus of the novel with much discussion amongst the characters about what it is like to kill another human being, was it the right thing to do and what would it be like to die. In the end, Jordon is fatally wounded after successfully completing his mission and trying to escape. He waits by the roadside while the others get away, hoping to kill as many of the enemy soldiers as he can before he dies.
It took me a long time to get around to reading this book. I have been carrying it around with me since 1971. I finally read it in 2011. Forty years. It was well worth the wait. While each man’s death may diminish me to some extent, this novel has made me whole.
Haiku – Short Poems
According to Jane Hirshfield, in the “Art of Haiku,” a Haiku is a poem composed of 17 syllables or sound bites containing vivid imagery. The traditional Haiku poem should evoke a particular season, although western Haiku writers don’t always follow this proscription.
The original meaning of the Japanese word Haiku, according to Hirshfield, is “Playful verse.” The celebrated Japanese poet, Basho, raised Haiku to new levels of significance by adding a spiritual and emotional dimension.
Basho wasn’t too strict about the form. He advised that you can have an extra syllable or two as long as the poem sounded right. If the sound was off, then a re-write was in order. He also said it was important to see the world with new eyes and to write down the present moment.
Three Haikus
Here are three Haikus that I wrote that I would like to share with you.
The monk stumbles from
The Black Mountain Demon’s Cave
To find the world one bright pearl.
The sound of the dragon
Singing in the withered tree
Comes to my ear.
The empty boat returns
From its long Journey abroad
Full of moonlight.
Haiku For You
A lightening flash
on a darkened dash
a drop of dew on a blade of grass.
Tha Starving Masks
The starving masks dance lightly in the breeze
autumn will come soon
time flies like arrows.
The Swerve
“The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” by Stephen Greenblatt is a book that holds special significance for me. It is a book about a book hunter who lived in the 15th century, Poggio Bracciolini. It resonates with me because I too am book hunter.
I know how Poggio Bracciolini must have felt when he came across a dusty scroll hidden away in the library of the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda in Germany. This scroll was one of the few remaining copies extant in the world and the only copy that had surfaced to that point. It consisted of an important poem, “On the Nature of Things,” written by Lucretius in 50 BCE. This book would change the course of human events.
“On the Nature of Things” is a poem about the philosophy of Epicurus. Epicurus, a Greek philosopher living in Athens in the third century B.C.E, was a proponent of the theory of atomism. This theory rests on the idea that the basic building blocks of matter are tiny invisible particles called atoms. Epicurus was also a proponent of the pleasure principle. He believed one’s primary aim in life should be enhancing one’s pleasure and avoiding pain. The pursuit of happiness should be the goal of life. Liberated from superstition, you would be free to pursue pleasure. Peace of mind is the key to enduring pleasure. The Church of the 15th century however, thought otherwise. “On the Nature of Things” was considered to be a radical and dangerous document.
“The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” is a book about books. Greenblatt goes into the history of writing books and bookmaking, libraries, and book storage. He discusses the readers of books and the owners of books from antiquity. He describes these readers to be few in number and usually the wealthy elite. They were a cultivated society of men and women whose homes had rooms designated solely for the purpose of reading books.
“The Swerve” is also a history of the times in which Poggio lived. He lived in Florence during the 15th century. He became secretary to Pope John XXIII. These were wild times for the Church. There were actually three Popes at the time all claiming legitimacy. Pope John XXIII (Baldassare Cossa) was eventually deposed after being accused of simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder.
After the Pope was deposed and imprisoned, Poggio unemployed, considered himself to be free. Free to hunt books. Free to read and free from all cares and worries of worldly affairs. He withdrew into the quarters of his private library in his castle. Books delighted him. According to Poggio, time spent with books takes our minds away from our troubles.
The most important impact the book had for me was to answer two burning questions: Is the world determined? And, do we have free will?
Determinism conflicts with the doctrine of free will. Lucretius suggests that atoms tend to swerve randomly (Clinamen). When atoms fall straight down through space they deflect a bit here and there, at uncertain times and places, slightly changing their motion. This swerving action creates the free will that we all take advantage of in our daily lives and allows us to have purpose.
The other important legacy Lucretius leaves us with is the idea that the highest goal of life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be all about the pursuit of happiness.
We find the echoes of these ideas in our own Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. In it he declared man’s right to life, freedom, and also to “the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson owned many editions of “On the Nature of Things in various translations. It was one of his favorite books.
Justice and Freedom
Some things defy simplification the way Hamlet defies augury. The reconciliation between individual freedom and the collective organization of society is just such an example. To put it more succinctly, how does one reconcile justice with freedom? There some who say that these two principles are contradictory, therefore mutually exclusive. Individual freedom is for the Wall Street Banker while justice is for the Main Street crowd. Justice for all means a sacrifice of individual freedom for the good of all. This is the theory of utility ethics.
Christianity seems to suggest a solution since its essence is grounded on the sacrifice of the innocent. Justice, however cannot be obtained without rebellion. Main Street must barricade Wall Street.
There is nothing else more worth living for in this unjust and corrupt world than the daunting task of establishing justice and preserving freedom for those who are destined from birth to live a life of servitude.
When we think about social themes we should think about the individual. Whenever we think about the individual, we must think about the good of all.
Right Livelihood
Right livelihood is one of the 14 mindfulness trainings as defined by Thich Nhat Hahn. They were formerly known as precepts, but Thay changed the titles to align more with what he saw as the true meaning of the terms which he believes are meant to be more like guiding principles.
The trainings requires the practitioner to undergo certain vows to live a life and work in an occupation that is not harmful to sentient beings, one that emphasizes understanding and compassion. Occupations to avoid would include arms dealing, drug dealing, and the slaughtering and butchery of animals. As concerned and responsible citizens we must be aware of out interrelationship to the environment and not despoil it.
Right livelihood is also one of the Noble Eightfold Paths, which is one of the earliest teachings of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni. According to Thich Nhat Hahn, writing in his book, “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching,” the Buddha, as he lay dying, said to one of his adherents, “… it is not important whether you are fully enlightened. The question is whether you want to liberate yourself. If you do, then practice the Noble Eightfold Path.”
The term right livelihood implies a choice. The burden of freedom we carry as human beings requires us to make choices. I have heard some say that because of the economy, “I really didn’t have a choice, I had to work in the meat packing industry, I had to work in this industry or that industry.” While each individual should be viewed with non-judgmental kindness and compassion, we must understand that we actually do have choices.
I can tell you from personal experience that I have had to make some hard choices along the way regarding how I was going to make my living. When I was a young man I worked in a tobacco factory for about six months. I was given the opportunity to go into management. The job paid well and the opportunity was great. I knew then that I couldn’t work for an industry that was basically a merchant of death, dealing out misery, and destruction. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. A few years later, while living in Oklahoma and facing another life changing moment, I had the opportunity to go into hog raising business for the consumer market. Raising pigs for slaughter. I thought about that for about five minutes and said no. I knew it couldn’t be good for my karma. In both cases other opportunities became available to me and I thrived.
Our freedom as humans requires us to make hard choices and to be responsible for the choices we make. Choices lead to action, action creates karma. Life is propelled by the law of cause and effect. You make a good cause, you have a positive effect. You make a bad cause, you have a negative effect. This is how karma works.
By choosing the right livelihood, you follow the path that leads away from suffering, both for yourself and for others. The most important thing is if you can’t do good at least don’t do any harm.
Ghost Dog 