Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Isabel Steva Hernandez (Colita)/Corbis Gabriel García Márquez 1975
There are times when time needs to stand still for a seemingly fleeting moment that lasts until the end of time. Yesterday was such a time. But it didn’t happen. Nothing stood still. News was slow coming in, and trickled on as the hours passed, to reach a minor crescendo later, that the world’s greatest living writer had died. And I know it’s because I’m an incurable romantic (I know because incurable romantics are not that stupid) that I feel that way. The lack of attention and respect and mourning to me means there are not nearly enough incurable romantics left in the world, or if they’re there, they must be hiding somewhere.
Because if you ask me, at a time like this, wars should be halted, armistices announced, enemies should become friends, shake hands, kiss and put their arms around each other’s shoulders, entire nations of mothers and daughters should be weeping in unending parades swaying down the streets of the cities, economies should come to an abrupt standstill and all workmen lay down their tools, newspapers should publish multiple extra editions to be sold on street corners, radio and TV shows should be interrupted so popes and presidents alike can urge their people in special bulletins to pray for the souls of both the deceased and those left behind, and join them, and each other, in mourning the loss to humanity, in paying reference to, and being grateful to the heavens for, the bigger than life talent that once walked among them and the riches that were bestowed upon them, be thankful for the world being a better place because of it.
That’s how I think the great men of the world should be mourned. But none of it did happen. The world, even as it has greatly increased both its sheer numbers of communications media and the speed at which they travel, doesn’t seem to be capable of recognizing greatness anymore. Between the fight for material wealth, 24 hour reality TV, propagandistic news shows and a constant adulation of billionaires and botox-enhanced semi-humanoid lifeforms, something has gotten lost: the ability to see what really makes life worth living. Those who’ve never read Gabriel García Márquez, or have long forgotten, will claim they can decide for themselves what makes life worth living. And that may be true to a point, but money isn’t it. And Márquez may be. Because people live through what binds them together, and they die through what tears them apart.
It’s no surprise that reading through the obituaries this morning, I found the man himself had said it better than I ever could, and long before I could have, in his seminal work, Cien Años de Soledad, One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“’The world must be all fucked up,’ he said then, ‘when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.’ That was the last thing he was heard to say.”
And I don’t want to write another obituary, I merely want to pay my respect to a man I never met who taught me to see, and dream, and then see more. Where do you find a man who creates a world all his own from scratch, and then convinces you, page by page that you can’t stop reading, that you live in that world? Even though you don’t know the man, and have never been where his stories are situated. In the best obituary I read today, Pico Iyer for TIME catches it wonderfully in his last sentence:
” … when he died on Thursday in his home in Mexico City, it did not seem impossible that a man could open his mouth and songbirds would fly out.”
Gabriel García Márquez is for 20th century literature what Picasso was for its painting. There are a few who are great, like Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda. But none of them united entire continents with their voice and under their wings. And none of them created entire worlds. Or were personal friends with both the Cuban and the American president, at the same time. Not that it’s any use to make it a competition. Márquez was a great admirer – and rightly so – of American writers like Faulkner (who he cited as a major influence, and who published his first book the year Márquez was born, 1927), and of Hemingway, Melville, Twain. And he fits in the rich tradition of Cervantes, Proust, Rimbaud, Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and others.
Another great quote perhaps makes clear what the place of Gabriel García Márquez in this gallery of greats is. American writer William Kennedy, born one year after Márquez (he’s 86 now), long ago wrote in the New York Times about One Hundred Years of Solitude that it was:
” … the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
May I humbly suggest that for Easter, you shut off your tablet and smartphone and Kardashians and pick up a copy of something anything by Márquez. It doesn’t have to be the rich and voluminous One Hundred Years of Solitude, you can try Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, or any of his other books. And then reflect for a fleeting eternity on the fact that this man who was so generous to share his talent and his world and his wealth of imagination and ability to put it into words with you, died only yesterday.
