Hi all,
For our final week on 100 Years of Solitude, it’s all about love! Mainly, I talk about Amaranta and her sealed fate, the beautiful poverty-stricken love of Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, and the wild passion of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula.
Question: Is there a ‘purest form’ of love? Is one manner of love more desirable than another? If not, how do you justify Amaranta Ursula’s irreverence to controlling the ants, because of her passionate escapades, which results in the death of her son (and bloodline)?
See you all again soon,
Curtis HR
Ha! You ask a rather different question in your video than you do in the text that follows it… Your video question is also more or less the same one I asked in my lecture (which is fine), and I’m not sure of the answer. I feel there’s a sort of performative contradiction: the novel seems to suggest that the Buendías’ fate is indeed sealed, because it’s all been written already, but I like the notion that Melquíades’s papers are like Schroedinger’s famous box, in which the cat both is and is not alive, and we will not know which outcome ultimately turns out until we open the box (read the papers). We could imagine another book, another version, with a very different ending. At least I feel that I can!