Needless to say, this book shall live on my shelves forever. May indeed, be crispy-fried along with me and buried in a tiny cherrywood coffin neath a rock out in the woods beyond my home. Or not really this one, for this is getting tattered and I dropped it in the garage once and it hit a grease spot of some sort (he didn’t spill anything, nor did I) and I, who never put my name inside the sacred pages of a text well read and paid for, still cannot abide the stain along the edges of the hundred pages in the heart of Solitude. As soon as I am able, I shall buy another copy, clean and unabused, untainted.
I am beginning to form a closeness with mankind and yet I feel the need to hold it at arm’s length:
"Shut up in his workshop, Colonel Aureliano Buendia thought about those changes and for the first time in his quiet years of solitude he was tormented by the definite certainty that it had been a mistake not to have continued the war to its final conclusion. During that time a brother of the forgotten Colonel Magnifico Visbal was taking his seven-year-old grandson to get a soft drink at one of the pushcarts on the square and because the child accidentally bumped into a corporal of police and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather as he tried to stop him. The whole town saw the decapitated man pass by as a group of men carried him to his house, with a woman dragging the head along by its hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child." (p. 257)
What can I say? What does Colonel Buendia say?
"One of these days," he shouted, "I’m going to arm my boys so we can get rid of these shitty gringos!"
Eloquently put, Aurie. History repeats itself. What we’ve done to others comes back to be done to us. Perceptions change. Armies change. Men switch sides and switch again until we do not know even what we know as truth.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology