It was the story of history and war, fantasy and parables, and in the center of it all was the Buendia family, who at times were darlings to the Fates and then abandoned ruthlessly without warning. There were all together seven generations, and they all bore the same names that set their destiny. They lived extravagantly when rich, and fearlessly when struggling. With every rise and fall, every life and death, the family, ignorant of their tragic fate, faced it blindly and valiantly. Then in the end, everyone else faded, and all that remained was the resilient spirit of the Buendias, as defiant as ever, exiting the stage, perhaps to sleep for another hundred years before rising again.
Their lives were filled with mystery and magic, and beyond the beautiful words it was the unpredictable blend of realism and fantasy that sucks you in. Perhaps our lives are too normal and we long for some magic, and Marquez gives you that and more. Although I wonder if there is such thing as the normal life. Underneath all that normalcy, people keep secret memories of joy and pain that may have been numbed and dulled by time, only to creep out at unexpected moments as reminders of who they once were. Then a sudden pang hits and we wonder where the years have gone and how we ended up where we are, and start missing the days of old, like when Aureliano stood in front of the firing squad and remembered the afternoon when his father took him to see ice. And you may be one of the lucky ones who can find those to reminisce and share your memories, but sooner or later you realize that no one bears those memories the same way, and who you are is a culmination of all that you bear. You become keenly aware of yourself as an individual, and that is when you feel the solitude. Your life may be filled with people and things and events and your Facebook timeline tells a story of endless excitement. You find connections and build relationships and get so caught up in all of it you forget that in the end your soul will depart this world as lonely as it came. No one will stay with you from the beginning to the end. No one will see the world quite like you do. No one has the power to make you or break you. Even a God who demands obedience gave you the power of choice, as long as you can bear the consequence of disbelief or disobedience.
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember,” he said. And isn’t that the truth. Life isn’t what happens to us, it’s what we make happen, and how we deal with the consequences. It is in our nature to be insatiable, this fundamental drive powered us to modernity as we know it through our search for knowledge and comfort, and at the same time destroys us through envy, gluttony, vanity, avarice. We may not all have been dealt the same cards when we were born, but life is extremely fair in the sense that it’s unfair to everyone, and that no one is born content. We choose the things we want to pursue in life, and call them dreams, whether they be money, power, knowledge, faith, love, or rock and roll. We are fortunate or unfortunate in that we are presented with so many choices today that we no longer treasure anything, and we don’t fight as hard because the alternative isn’t so bad either. We ponder about the choices we’ve already made and agonize the choices we need to make. I sometimes wonder whether life would be better if we didn’t get so many choices, and then decided that being able to choose is worth it all. In fact, it is what makes life so amazing.
As I sit in my grandmother’s hospital room looking out into this strange city that once had been all I knew, I’m troubled by a rare sense of fear. Fear of time slipping away, of losing control, of one day ending up in a hospital bed and not being able to LIVE as I’be strived to live. We are not always aware of ourselves growing old, but once in a while we see the babe we held in our arms walking across a graduation stage, or discover the man who used to swing us into the sky taking a break climbing stairs, and we are suddenly reminded that for better or worse, we have also grown old. The world changed around us and we with it, and if we are lucky, the years have not passed idly and we all have our stories to tell.
My aunt said something extremely simple and profound today as we sat around waiting for my grandmother to wake up. 生活，就是生下来，活下去。Death invokes a celebration of life, and loss allows us to treasure the things we’ve gained. Time, memory, dreams, and love. More than the magical and exotic, the central themes of Marquez’s stories are also simple and profound. They are just about being born, and continuing to live, and making of it what you will.>
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