The Morning Reading: "Death did not really matter to him but life did"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez with Pablo Neruda in Paris. (Sean Dolan)

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

This was the paperback edition that I read.

"Aureliano did not understand until then how much he loved his friends, how much he missed them, and how much he would have given to be with them at that moment."

"At dawn, after a summary court-martial, Arcadio was shot against the wall of the cemetery. In the last two hours of his life he did not manage to understand why the fear that had tormented him since childhood had disappeared. Impassive, without even worrying about making a show of his recent bravery, he listened to the interminable charges of the accusation. He thought about Úrsula, who at that hour must have been under the chestnut tree having coffee with José Arcadio Buendía. He thought about his eight-month-old daughter, who still had no name, and about the child who was going to be born in August. He thought about Santa Sofía de la Piedad, whom he had left the night before salting down a deer for next day's lunch, and he missed her hair pouring over her shoulders and her eyelashes, which looked as if they were artificial. He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict dosing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most...In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he felt the security of power, a few feet from where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death did not really matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes listen to Toni Morrison. (David Carrasco)

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