Perspective: of Time and Space and Love and Marquez!!!

Its World heritage Day today, the celebration of which is of some import in my heritage city…I’ve been invited to speak at a forum and must leave in a short while…

Another thing of greater import in my world happened today, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, passed away, 13 short of the Hundred years of solitude that so enriched my life

I read him at an impressionable age, and after the initial wonderment and awe had passed, realized that I had acquired my somewhat warped sense of time, reality and more importantly love , from him.

Marquez had an open mind about what constitutes reality, and he told an interviewer that "My most important problem was to destroy the demarcation line which separates what looks real and what looks fantastic, because in the world that I was trying to evoke that barrier didn't exist." He also believed in UFO’S  a notion that I too am inclined to accept, ( I would find it easy to accept that God is an Alien)but thought they were just passing by Earth on their way to some other destination.

His simple deep seated wisdom always always made sense to me. Therefore when he said, “ no medicine can cure, what happiness cannot’ , learnt that there was only one way to live, to live in the pursuit of happiness to the best of one’s ability, and also that, there was a time to let go, let go of even that pursuit and to let that which will happen, happen without futile struggle.

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” 
One Hundred Years of Solitude

That’s something that I have repeated to myself over and over again , as I have gone through my lot in life, moments immortalized, to the exclusion of everything else, they alone matter.

Affections ‘rot’ away, or are rendered insignificant, people rendered redundant, and the heart in all honesty ‘may ‘have more rooms than a whorehouse’…life nevertheless goes on, or it stops, it matters not what, for the moment remains.

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
and that defines and becomes your reality. Reality for him (and for me)was neither an absolute nor one-dimensional. I remember being bewildered with the forays he made in time, back and forth, when I first read, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now I am in sync entirely!!!

Rationalism often prevents us from seeing reality as anything other than material, concrete. It is often nothing more than perception, and we are the creators of our own reality.

Therefore that which the world described as ‘magical realism’ was not strange or unique for Marquez, it was simply real.

“ Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things. To make this point I usually cite the case of the American explorer F. W. Up de Graff who made an incredible journey through the Amazon jungle at the end of the last century and saw, among other things, a river with boiling water, and a place where the sound of the human voice brought on torrential rain.”

Love and lust, war and revolution, poverty, youth, senility, the finality and endlessness of death, even the voraciousness  of capitalism, the corruption of government were all a part of his real world, things that he wrote about with ease and simplicity.

Marquez is gone but he is also irreplaceable…and will live on

Oh I will miss him…and so long as the world remembers he will live…

More about the past , the present and the future tomorrow…from the World Heritage Day piece…!

-vinny jain