Yesterday I wrote about the strange feelings brought on by seeing any sort of image, sound, photograph, movie, what-have-you, of someone who is no longer alive. When I got into my berth (rack maybe? we’re talking submarine/train style sleeping) last night, I flipped on my battery powered camper light and started into One Hundred Years of Solitude (for the third time!). The first paragraph I read dealt with the daguerreotype machine Melquiades brings with him to Macondo. Ursula will not have her photograph taken because “she did not want to survive as a laughingstock for her grandchildren.”
The writing surrounding the daguerreotype echoes much of what I wrote, or rather I echo the book; Marquez wrote this novel nearly ten years before I was born, and he may have unleashed the idea from his brain many years before that. It was coincidence that I read this segment after I published my post. But then again, I had read the book twice before, so perhaps, no, certainly, Marquez’s writing was somewhere in the back of my brain, coloring my thoughts about images, without my conscience even realizing. More to think about.
A note about me: The mainspring behind my desire to improve my Spanish skills, is so that I can read all of Marquez’s works as they were originally written, in their original language. They are lovely in English, but I am sure I will find them stunning in their original tongue.
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