I just finished reading Love in the Time of Cholera. I'm a bit behind in my reading it seems. I will say what I'm reading and the reply is usually something along the lines of "that is so last year." At least I am finally getting to it. (I'd bought it a few months ago just because I'd heard it referred to several times and got curious.
I did enjoy it - although I thought it bogged down about 2/3 of the way through and I was hoping for the story to get resolved!! Or maybe my knees were just hurting so much I would have to close my eyes and drift!
But towards the very end, there was a passage that really resonated with me, and I was struck once again at how some themes are so universal.
Fermina Daza says, " 'We have to get rid of all these trinkets; there's no room to turn around.' And her husband laughs because he knows she will just fill the spaces up once she clears some space."
I mean, is this sounding familiar??
She tears through the house, "razing closets, emptying out trunks and tearing apart the attics" and the patio is littered and she is ready to burn everything but then says, "It is a sin to burn all this, when so many people do not even have enough to eat."
The author's little dissertation on clutter intrigued me because it is so true:
"And so the burning was postponed, it was always postponed, and things were only shifted from their places of privilege to the stables that had been transformed into storage bins for remnants, while the spaces that had been cleared, just as he predicted, began to fill up again, to overflow with things that lived for a moment and then went to die in the closets: until the next time. She would say: 'Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.' That was true. She was dismayed by the voracity with which objects kept invading living spaces, displacing the humans, forcing them back into the corners, until Fermina Daza pushed the objects out of sight."
And then my favorite part, because it is so me: "For she was not as ordered as people thought, but she did have her own desperate method for appearing to be so: she hid the disorder."
The story goes on: "Death's passage through the house brought the solution. Once she had burned her husband's clothes, Fermina Daza realized that her hand had not trembled, and on the same impulse she continued to light the fire at regular intervals, throwing everything on it, old and new, not thinking about the envy of the rich or the vengeance of the poor who were dying of hunger. Finally she had the mango tree cut back at the roots until there was nothing left of that misfortune, and she gave the live parrot to the new Museum of the City. Only then did she draw a free breath in the kind of house she had always dreamed of: large, easy, and all hers."
I was so struck by how exactly the author had zeroed in on the question of clutter, excess and our vain attempts to conquer the control that things seem to exert over all of us.
I still dream of taming the beast!
(The photo has little to do with anything, except I was scrolling through photos thinking "Do any of these have anything to do with order?" And I thought how I am now doing with my classroom, what I used to do with my house. And since I got a new room last fall, I had every intention of having order that would perpetuate itself.
But alas, I too am dismayed at the "voracity with which objects keep invading living - and teaching - spaces" and some days it's pretty tough to hide the disorder!!
But my new room does have a "walk in closet" and it's a good hiding place because it has shelves and the door closes!!)
