August 1, 2008

Riff Off of The Age of Silence

During my lunch break just now, I read Marquez. I'm less than 100 pages away from finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude and the deeper I've sunk into this book, the more haunting the language and images have become. And after Amy's quick allusion to Marquez in a post about gestures and love, I thought it fitting to include the following passage, which made me cry in the middle of Au Bon Pain half an hour ago:

Aureliano Segundo thought without saying so that the evil was not in the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra Cotes, where something had happened during the deluge that had turned the animals sterile and made money scarce. Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

gorgeous. the thought of you reading this and weeping in au bon pain makes it even more perfect.