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Before he passed away, Anthony and I talked about what each of us would miss most about life. For him, it was the time spent with family and friends; for me it was Radiohead’s next album. That was a not altogether appropriate condensation of my broader point, which was that I would miss all the art and culture that I would never be able to experience.
I am reading books, listening to music, and watching films almost constantly, and yet humanity produces so much divine art every moment that I cannot hope to discover but the most minute amount of it before my time here has come to an end. Fortunately, I have an unwitting team of cultural investigators, known as my friends, who regularly bring notable examples to my attention.
When Anthony’s widow, Chas, lent Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In the Time of Cholera
Olimpia Zuleta had the joyous love of a startled pigeon fancier, and she preferred to remain naked for several hours in a slow-moving repose that was, for her, as loving as love itself. The cabin was dismantled, half painted, and they would take the odor of turpentine away with them in the memory of a happy afternoon. In a sudden inspiration, Florentino Ariza opened a can of red paint that was within reach of the bunk, wet his index finger, and painted the pubis of the beautiful pigeon fancier with an arrow of blood pointing south, and on her belly the words: This pussy is mine. That same night, Olimpia Zuleta undressed in front of her husband, having forgotten what was scrawled there, and he did not say a word, his breathing did not even change, nothing, but he went to the bathroom for his razor while she was putting on her nightgown, and in a single slash he cut her throat. [p. 217]
Until that time his greatest battle, fought tooth and nail and lost without glory, was against baldness. From the moment he saw the first hairs tangled in his comb, he knew that he was condemned to a hell whose torments cannot be imagined by those who do not suffer them. He struggled for years. There was not a pomade or lotion he did not try, a belief he did not accept, a sacrifice he did not endure, in order to defend every inch of his head against the ravages of that devastation. He memorized the agricultural information in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard that there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a foreign newcomer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter. The new barber had begun to demonstrate that in fact he had a fertile hand, when it was discovered that he was wanted by several Antillean police forces for raping novices, and he was taken away in chains. [p. 261]
She drank so much anisette that she had to be helped up the stairs, and she suffered an attack of laughing until she cried, which alarmed everyone. However, when at last she recovered her self-possession in the perfumed oasis of her cabin, they made the tranquil, wholesome love of experienced grandparents, which she would keep as her best memory of that lunatic voyage. Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. [p. 345]
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Support Barack Obama
This is one of my all-time favorites. Perhaps it’s time to dust off my copy and read it again.
“She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.”
We read this book out loud to each other each night before bed… it was one of our favorites.