I’ve been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a beautiful book. Latin American writers that I’ve read and enjoyed have this uncanny ability to create these dreamy, magical worlds where even the supernatural doesn’t seem out of place or unrealistic.
And I got to ruminating about how sometimes we like to catalog the events in our lives like we expect them to have some significance for someone other than ourselves. One Hundred Years is a work of fiction, but it’s about the lives of all the members of one family. Strong, emotional women capable of amazing feats of self deprivation. Hedonistic men with a penchant for political battles. And these short sentences don’t do the characters the justice they deserve because they’re all so rich and interesting in a way far greater than we imagine ourselves to be.
His writing is so imaginative and beautiful. And reading beautiful writing always makes me feel a little like I’m missing something. I was putting away all my binders this weekend for the housewarming party (pictures here), and I keep a lot of my own fiction writing in binders. But I haven’t written fiction in at least a year. My online journals have been my writing outlet for a long time now. I don’t know how I got out of the habit of writing things completely made up in my own head except that I started to realize I didn’t have any skill or talent at it and gave up. But in doing that, I gave up a great pleasure, too.
And I wonder how much of what I write means anything to anyone. Like this blog. I read other people’s blogs and I enjoy it, and sometimes they make me think. And sometimes they are just chatter sifted through with the rest of the chatter in the world — the emails, the news, the links, the pictures. And sometimes the things I write are just chatter even to myself. What is it about making that noise that makes me feel so good?
Tags: books