Love and marriage don't go together like horse and carriage

We often forget that the celebrated Romeo and Juliet were teenagers who were madly in love, and died in their teens.  Had their feuding Capulets and the Montagues blessed the young love, the two would have gotten married.  If that had happened, not only will there be no story of Romeo and Juliet, chances are also that Romeo and Juliet would not have had a happy life ever after.

It is not that I am pessimistic about teenage love.  Au contraire!  It is simply that daily life sucks away all those glorious emotions that made Romeo and Juliet.  Such is the life that we humans live.

The men and women of literature help us understand this human condition.  Gabriel García Márquez is simply masterful in Love in the time of cholera when he presents the complex emotions that make us who we are.  Through one of his characters, he writes about matrimony:

an absurd invention that could exist only by the infinite grace of God. It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. He would say: "The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."

Perhaps every teenager in love, every young bridge and groom, thinks that theirs is the true love that would defy all odds and past human experience and would last forever.  Maybe we need such optimism among the young; if not, humanity has no future.

What every starry-eyed couple find out sooner than later is that the routines of everyday existence can seem boring after a while to most people.  Life can be Groundhog Day over and over again.  Marquez writes that "the problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom."

I am pretty sure that Romeo and Juliet had no idea about the boredom of everyday life, and how life--married or single--"must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."  Perhaps they lucked out not knowing that life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations.”

Now, that's love sitting down!

What a glorious paragraph from the immortal Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the time of cholera:

He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion's stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come. That memory often returned to her as the years weakened the stream, for she never could resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won contests for marksmanship in filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a fantastic fountain, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it. He would say: "The toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men." He contributed to domestic peace with a quotidian act that was more humiliating than humble: he wiped the rim of the bowl with toilet paper each time he used it. She knew, but never said anything as long as the ammoniac fumes were not too strong in the bathroom, and then she proclaimed, as if she had uncovered a crime: "This stinks like a rabbit hutch." On the eve of old age this physical difficulty inspired Dr. Urbino with the ultimate solution: he urinated sitting down, as she did, which kept the bowl clean and him in a state of grace.

I suppose there is a time and a place for any book, too.  A few years ago, I started reading this novel and never was able to proceed beyond a few pages.  This time around, I find it to be riveting.

At 350 pages, Love in the time of cholera is not for those with attention spans that have been conditioned by Twitter or Facebook posts.  This is not one that can be forwarded via WhatsApp.  The reader has to take in the words slowly and let the imagery and the emotions sink in. The reader has to enter that world, familiarize oneself with the context and the characters, and then begin to feel like and for those characters.  The days of such books are numbered, bit by byte!

BP oil spill, and One Hundred Years of Solitude

Yes, there is a connection between the horrible oil spill and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's phenomenal work.  What is the connection, you ask?

Macondo is the magical town where the Buendia family lives, and dies.  Oddly enough, the area where BP's rig was located was called Macondo:

The Macondo Prospect is an oil and gas prospect in the Gulf of Mexico which was the site of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in April 2010 which led to a major oil spill in the region.

Corporations give projects strange names, and this happened to be one of them. Remember the names that Enron had for its projects, such as Fatboy, Jedi, Braveheart, ...?

Ok, back to Macondo in Marquez's creation:

The novel chronicles the seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo. The family patriarch and founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and his wife (and first cousin), Úrsula, leave their home in Riohacha, Colombia in hopes of finding a new home. One night on their journey while camping on the banks of a river, José Arcadio Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo. Upon awakening, José Arcadio Buendía decides to found this city on the site of their campground. After wandering aimlessly in the jungle for many days, the founding of Macondo can be seen as the founding of Utopia^[6]José Arcadio Buendía believes it to be surrounded by water, and from this 'island' he invents the world according to him, naming things at will^[7]. After its establishment, Macondo soon becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events. All the events revolve around the many generations of the Buendía family, who are either unable or unwilling to escape periodic, mostly self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, Macondo is destroyed by a terrible hurricane, which symbolizes the cyclical turmoil inherent in Macondo.

Well, the hurricane season has begun in the real world Macondo ...
The series of events, and the names that BP had for each of the failed maneuvers, like "tophat", will be funny and comical if only it were not so awfully tragic.

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If Marquez' Macondo story was one hundred years of solitude, then how long will this BP Macondo story run?  It might very well go past the latest August deadline--the gushing well might not be capped until December!
But, wait:

The ultimate worst-case scenario is that the well is never successfully plugged, said Fred Aminzadeh, a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Center for Integrated Smart Oil Fields who previously worked for Unocal Corp. That would leave the well to flow for probably more than a decade, he said in a telephone interview.