Solitude: A Return to the Self, 1st Edition

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She sees him as a kindred soul, telling me over the phone from her London home: "I related to how he viewed the world so alone. He was very emotional but very existential too, always in a position of being on the outside looking in." Munch wasn’t very happy, as one would suspect from his work: "He had a lot of relationships but not much sex," she says. Years later, the Abbé explains to Dantes how his store of learning has sustained him all these years, much of which he will pass on to his young protege. One Hundred Years of Solitude ( Spanish: Cien años de soledad, Latin American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲos ðe soleˈðað]) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature. [1] [2] [3] [4]

I don't know entirely where I stand on this. On the one hand, it features lots of lovely tidbits about how people have dealt with solitude, most of them miserable depressives. The whole thing is a defense of solitude as an essential component of well-being, written as it was at a time when interpersonal relationships were deemed to be of paramount importance, and long before lots of basement-dwelling assholes started claiming that their "introversion" was why they were assholes. Santa Sofía is a beautiful virgin girl and the daughter of a shopkeeper. [17] She is hired by Pilar Ternera to have sex with her son Arcadio, her eventual husband. [17] She is taken in along with her children by the Buendías after Arcadio's execution. After Úrsula's death she leaves unexpectedly, not knowing her destination. Although we are faced with a very convoluted narrative, García Márquez is able to define clear themes while maintaining individual character identities, and using different narrative techniques such as third-person narrators, specific point of view narrators, and streams of consciousness. Cinematographic techniques are also employed in the novel, with the idea of the montage and the close-up, which effectively combine the comic and grotesque with the dramatic and tragic. Furthermore, political and historical realities are combined with the mythical and magical Latin American world. Lastly, through human comedy the problems of a family, a town, and a country are unveiled. This is all presented through García Márquez's unique form of narration, which causes the novel to never cease being at its most interesting point. [23] Second - this book does a really great job of talking about the need for solitude as a balance to the need for human relationships and interactions using the experiences of highly accomplished historical figures including Beatrix Potter, Kant, Dostoevsky, Newton and many others. By the novel's end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, with the only remaining Buendías being Amaranta Úrsula and her nephew Aureliano, whose parentage is hidden by his grandmother Fernanda, and he and Amaranta Úrsula unknowingly begin an incestuous relationship. They have a child who bears the tail of a pig, fulfilling the lifelong fear of the long-dead matriarch Úrsula. Amaranta Úrsula dies in childbirth and the child is devoured by ants, leaving Aureliano as the last member of the family. He decodes an encryption Melquíades had left behind in a manuscript generations ago. The secret message informs the recipient of every fortune and misfortune that the Buendía family's generations lived through. As Aureliano reads the manuscript, he feels a windstorm starting around him, and he reads in the document that the Buendía family is doomed to be wiped from the face of the Earth because of it. In the last sentence of the book, the narrator describes Aureliano reading this last line just as the entire town of Macondo is scoured from existence. [12] The Buendía family tree. Symbolism and metaphors [ edit ]

Aureliano José is Colonel Aureliano Buendía's illegitimate son with Pilar Ternera. [17] He joins his father in several wars before deserting to return to Macondo upon hearing that it is possible to marry one's aunt. Aureliano José is obsessed with his aunt, Amaranta, who raised him since birth and who categorically rejects his advances. He is eventually shot to death by a Conservative captain midway through the wars. [17] Santa Sofía de la Piedad

Thus he says, "The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account." The key is in forging meaningful relationships, according to Dr Andrea Wigfield of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at University of Sheffield. The centre's research showed that when people can't be together, arts-based activities, such as children and grandparents working together online on arts projects, can help them to connect. However these aren't enough on their own to combat loneliness if meaningful relationships are absent. In the UK, Loneliness Awareness Week (LAW) 2021 runs from 14 to 18 June. Run by the Marmalade Trust, the theme this year is acceptance, and their "We get lonely" campaign aims to make loneliness accepted as a natural part of being human. Wolf is the German writer I love most. In this autofictional novel from 1987, she chronicles a day she spends by herself in a little house in the East German countryside trying to make sense of two competing events in her life: the risky brain surgery her brother undergoes that day and the nuclear meltdown in Cernobyl a few days before. It’s a difficult book at times because Wolf is grappling with something that our psyches usually don’t allow us to see: how helpless we are in the face of fateful events beyond our control, and how catastrophically we are thrown into history. Accident is so inspiring because Wolf knows that we have to deal with that fact alone – and gives us a hard-won example of how to do just that. One book I am re-reading as a Covid sheltering book (4/26/2020) is "The Count of Monte Cristo." Dantes, a framed prisoner in solitary confinement in a French dungeon, is a simple, young, uneducated sailor. (Dantes would go on to become the Count many years hence). It would be 10 years in prison before Dantes connects with his fellow solitary, Abbé Faria who saves his life in more ways than one. For the time being, however, Dantes has no real mental resources of his own to sustain him. For a time, he tries religion but gives up in despair. He becomes self-destructive, but eventually resigns himself to death. Bloom, Harold. Bloom's Critical Interpretations: Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom: "Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude". Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003

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One can, of course, be solitary in company. In fact, the psychologist Donald Winnicott claims that a child can learn to be alone only in the presence of a trusted adult. The second half of the 19th century witnessed a rash of new convents, where women could be alone together, while a less high-minded form of solitary confinement was provided by the prison system. (The yachtsman Robin Knox-Johnson thought the crime rate might fall if people were sentenced to sail around the world alone instead of going to gaol.) A cameo on smoking shows how in the postwar era the habit was seen less as a route to the churchyard than as a pathway to inner calm, even as a variety of prayer. She plays an integral part in the plot as she is the link between the second and the third generations of the Buendía family. The author highlights her importance by following her death with a declaratory "it was the end." [17] Third generation [ edit ] Arcadio that the mind must make its own happiness, that any troubles can be endured if the sufferer has resources of his own to sustain him." a b c d Antonio Sacoto (1979) Cinco novelas claves de la novela hispano americana ( El señor presidente, Pedro Páramo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, La ciudad y los perros, Cien años de soledad), Eliseo Torres & Sons, New York