340 Monday Musings: 'Love in the time of Cholera' - A balm for the matters of heart
One reads a book only when one becomes deserving of it. One has to become deserving to absorb its infinite meanings, layers and implications; to have the privilege of shouldering the burden of understanding the soul of a book. I had picked up a copy of ‘Love at the time of cholera’ by the venerable Gabriel Garcia Marquez (GGM) many years ago and could not read it – now in hindsight knowing perhaps that i did not deserve to read it then. Someone gifted the book to me recently and this time i had the pleasure of finishing it – hopefully having deserved to read it.
I cannot thank my benefactor enough for the beautiful gift. This has been a balm for the bruises of the soul – some of which i was aware of and many more i never knew were not yet healed.
Here are the ones which touched me the most – hopefully you will find them meaningful to you too. This appears to be a treatise on the matters of the heart and love.
1. I will have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans
2. There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance of these days (to see the effects of cyanide led suicide as a doctor)...and when you find one, observe with care – they always have crystals in their heart
3. It is always easier to bear other peoples pain than your own
4. Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without the fear of pain
5. It is easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial every day miseries.
6. If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
7. The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
8. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning to conclude once again, that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
9. Take advantage of it now (the sufferings of love), while you are young and suffer all you can – because these things don’t last your whole life.
10. Curiosity (about every small detail about a person) is one of the many masks of love.
11. HE was still too young to know that the hearts memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
12. Then his journey seemed yet another proof of his mother’s wisdom and he felt that he had the fortitude to endure forgetting.
13. Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves
14. No, I am not rich. I am just a poor man with lots of money. They are not the same thing.
15. There was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, and no manager with more lucid or dangerous than a poet.
16. ..And only then did he understand that a man realises that he is growing old, when he starts to look like his father.
17. And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.
18. That may be the reason why he does so many things, so that he will not have to think.
19. At the age of forty, all in life we need is someone who understands us.
20. Death has no sense of the ridiculous
21. Someone should invent something to do with the things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out. She was dismayed by the voracity with which objects kept invading livings spaces displacing the humans, forcing them back into the corners and then out of sight.
22. I do not believe in God but in am afraid of him.
23. After all letters belong to the person who writes them (and not the person who receives them). That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended.
24. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous Calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.
2. There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance of these days (to see the effects of cyanide led suicide as a doctor)...and when you find one, observe with care – they always have crystals in their heart
3. It is always easier to bear other peoples pain than your own
4. Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without the fear of pain
5. It is easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial every day miseries.
6. If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
7. The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
8. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning to conclude once again, that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
9. Take advantage of it now (the sufferings of love), while you are young and suffer all you can – because these things don’t last your whole life.
10. Curiosity (about every small detail about a person) is one of the many masks of love.
11. HE was still too young to know that the hearts memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
12. Then his journey seemed yet another proof of his mother’s wisdom and he felt that he had the fortitude to endure forgetting.
13. Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves
14. No, I am not rich. I am just a poor man with lots of money. They are not the same thing.
15. There was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, and no manager with more lucid or dangerous than a poet.
16. ..And only then did he understand that a man realises that he is growing old, when he starts to look like his father.
17. And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.
18. That may be the reason why he does so many things, so that he will not have to think.
19. At the age of forty, all in life we need is someone who understands us.
20. Death has no sense of the ridiculous
21. Someone should invent something to do with the things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out. She was dismayed by the voracity with which objects kept invading livings spaces displacing the humans, forcing them back into the corners and then out of sight.
22. I do not believe in God but in am afraid of him.
23. After all letters belong to the person who writes them (and not the person who receives them). That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended.
24. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous Calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.
25. The only regret I will have in dying is not dying for love.
Guru
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