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(gentle guitar music) - Good evening and welcome to the "Reading for Life" lecture based on the book "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"Reading for Life" is a movement of the imagination with the purpose of growing community around a shared love of literature.

The idea is that real community begins and ends with our imaginations, and few resources, if any, are as vital to the imagination's development as works of literature.

Our presenter tonight is Michael Verde.

Michael graduated with honors from the University of Texas's Plan II Honors Program, earned an MA in literary studies from the University of Iowa, and an MA in theology from the University of Durham, England, where he graduated at the top of his international class.

He taught for 15 years at the university and college-prep school levels, most recently at Indiana University and is currently completing his PhD with a focus on literature and religion.

Michael founded "Reading for Life" in 2005.

Michael, we're on to lecture number four, "Love in the Time of Cholera."

So I'm gonna pass it off to you.

- Great, Julie.

Thank you, Steve, Linda.

Good to have you.

And let's see what fun we can have trying to invite this novel to reveal itself in some way that if we weren't collaborating might not come to pass.

So I'll just get us started a little bit where the book starts, Pentecost Sunday.

The emphasis in the novel's beginning that it is Pentecost Sunday, it just keeps coming back that this is the day not only of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's death but also of Dr. Urbino's death.

And then the return throughout the novel when Dr. Urbino's death is announced through the telling, the tolling of the bells, again, it's emphasized, Pentecost Sunday.

So I want to start just taking, I'm attending to the novel now that the Pentecost Sunday is not incidental.

You can imagine having characters of this degree of import to the novel perish at any particular time it could have been, but to have two of your characters, one a principal minor character and one a main character to die on Pentecost Sunday, it's that kind of, let's say, underscoring, of the image that I think invites engagement with it.

So that's what I wanna try to do, just talk through a little bit of what makes Pentecost Sunday I think interesting as an image.

So Pentecost Sunday, for those of you who don't know, this is the date after Christ has returned, ascended, that the Spirit comes down, comes down to the apostles, and in the form of fire, and they begin to speak in tongues.

It's associated with the Holy Spirit because it's thought that the way that the apostles and those participating in the Pentecost, the way they're understanding each other defies normal communication.

They are speaking in a way that is something close to, let's say, perfect understanding or telepathy.

They're speaking in tongues that might not be decipherable through any human sort of recognition.

And yet there is perfect understanding passing throughout the apostles and the people participating in such a way that they're united in this kind of communion.

You could just say it is an intense form of communion.

But what's important here in terms of image is that there is a fire that comes down that is not of the earth, and because of its contact with the people on earth, they are then able to communicate in a way that is supernatural.

Often this image in the New Testament is contrasted with the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament principally because of this relationship to speech.

In the Tower of Babel, the idea is that man is going to ascend to God's throne and place himself on this throne.

He's gonna usurp God, and he's gonna sit in this throne and then in a sense become a God to himself.

And this project is short-circuited by God by having the participants suddenly speak in different dialects so that none can understand one another, and that way the project is aborted.

What makes these two images interesting is both kind of complementary with regards to speech but also contrast is the opposite way in which something rises.

With regards to the Tower of Babel, the initiative comes from the ego, from the human ego, and that is the impetus to ascend.

At Pentecost, there is a descent that precedes the ascension, and that descent is initiated by God.

In other words, the first movement is coming from heaven down as opposed from earth up.

It is after this descent that the people on earth are then able through speech to transcend the natural world.

Their ascent, in other words, has been in response to a descent.

They're in a kind of dialogue now with the divine as opposed to being in position of trying to usurp the divine.

So with those images in mind, I wanna try to connect to the novel in a couple of ways.

And here, I think, is a principal way into it, is to think of the natural world as constituting some kind of limit, and then the, I don't wanna say intrusion, I would say, I suppose, the intersection of a realm that is not of the earth.

In other words, you have the natural world, and then there is this intersection from another world that opens up possibilities that are not natural.

In other words, there is the possibility here of rising above nature.

And I want to suggest that that is an important idea if we're gonna make sense of love, that there is something about love that defies the natural order.

And I think we could think of this really in kind of bald evolutionary terms.

According to evolution, it's the survival of the fittest and reproductive fitness that determines what it is that lives or dies.

And the motive for change really has to do with this kind of cycle of life feeding on life.

In other words, within the parameters of evolution, love makes no sense.

There is something counter-evolutionary about the notion of love.

When you look at an explanation of evolution, what you won't find as a variable is something called love.

That is unscientific.

It's not reasonable.

Scientists don't go to work factoring that in as a possibility.

They're trying to make sense of what is or what is not without introducing this transcendent dimension, if you're following with me.

Within the terms of nature, love does not make any sense.

Another way to say that is within the terms of nature, love is an illusion.

And that brings us, I think, to the heart of the novel because few themes are sounded more often and more deeply than the idea of what is illusory and what is a disillusionment.

In other words, you had an illusion about something, but then you have a wake-up call, and all of a sudden, that illusion is dispelled.

The notion of illusion and disillusion, I want to throw in there, is somehow related to the question of, is love an illusion, or is it a reality that is more real in some ways than nature?

I wanna throw that out there as the heart of the novel and suggest that often that kind of question, at least within, let's say the Western world, often that question is associated with a form of salvation related to religion.

I mean, if you think about it, I grew up Southern Baptist.

We were gonna get born again.

And then when our biological death ended, we were going to be somehow in heaven where we weren't going to die through the Jesus' intervention.

In other words, that is a typical kind of route to achieve a certain form of eternity that is typical and understandable in the Western world.

And I wanna throw out I think an idea that's not really any objectionable, is that that is not the route that this novel is proposing to eternity.

This divine element seems to be very much located in a very natural love.

In other words, it is the kind of real love between a man and a woman in this case that achieves the kind of eternity that the Western world typically associates with a divine being that is not human.

If you wanna make a comparison, you can think of the Middle Ages and the courtly love and how Eros became, through the Greek tradition, Eros became something like a competitor to agape love.

So that you had these poets that were, they had their muses who were the maidens, who may or may not be their wives, who they devoted their lives to in total service, selflessness.

And this became a route to salvation that in many ways, if not in every way, was competitive with what the church was proposing as the means to salvation.

'Cause you could imagine the natural world and the spiritual world not combining.

In other words, you could think of, as one of the lovers say, this is Sara Noriega to Florentino, that it is physical love from the waist down and spiritual love from the waist up.

That suggests a kind of division that I think this novel is challenging very directly, that, in fact, the physical and the spiritual both have to be completely in play for it to be real love, which makes the scenes at the end of the novel between Florentino and Fermina so very interesting.

Because if the spiritual love and the physical love are going to have to unite, then the spiritual cannot reject the body.

The body in all of its decrepitude and let's say lack of what you would think of as a "Cosmopolitan" magazine beauty, the description of their bodies when they come to make love with all of the reality that you would think would not be a part of a typical love story.

Do you see what I mean?

The body itself, these two lovers had to accept the reality of their aging bodies and incorporate that into their love and not separate it or deny it or to otherwise evade it.

They had to bring the entire reality of nature, which includes death.

That had to be included in their affirmation of love.

- That definitely makes the ending make more sense to me.

And also some, like the, Florentino's whole, his whole arc of trying all these different kinds of love, that that makes that all make a lot more sense for me.

- Wonderful, because we can think of in a way, when she asked him, or it comes up where he offers freely, I suppose, that he was a virgin after we know that he's had like 622 lovers, and that's not including the ephemeral tryst, okay.

He states that's not the one night.

And then he says that basically this is the first time he's made love.

If we put these two together and think that heretofore all of his love with these other women have been from the waist down, that there has been an element of his heart that has not participated in these other, let's say, amours or sexual intercourse or however you wanna think of it, that there's been a part of his spirit that has actually has been reserved, a fidelity, a new fidelity, as the boat is called.

There's a part of him, you could say that the spiritual, that has never participated in all of those previous intercourses.

And to that, in other words, I'm reversing this in a way to make it possible for Florentino to have said something possibly true.

And when the ship captain ask him about do they wanna go back and forth, back and forth, and how long could you do that, and he says, "Forever."

And the captain says, "Are you serious?"

And he says, "Since the day I was born, I've never said anything that I didn't mean," challenges us to say, in what sense could Florentino still have been faithful?

Now the point of that is not whether or not he's been faithful or not.

That's not the point.

The point that we're trying to move towards is can the spiritual and the natural be wedded?

And if we think of illusions and love, is it possible that love is an illusion that is more real than the reality of reason?

I wanna say that again because I do think this is the query of the novel.

Is it possible that love is an illusion that proves to be more real than reality as reason understands it?

- I'm really liking this concept of illusion versus disillusion, and I think that we could maybe even extend it.

Although they mean different things, but it could also extend to like what's real and unreal.

And they're sort of, they sort of work not exactly on exact the same plane, but they do relate.

And I also think about, this story was set 1875 to 18, or, I'm sorry, 1875 to 1925.

And I think about why did Marquez choose that time period.

And to me, that's the pinnacle of Latin American colonialism and that big change-over, revolutions everywhere.

And there was this illusion of order and structure and whatnot.

And then the disillusion is like it was disarraying, revolution and a complete change and went from Urbino's science view of the world and the things that are real to the art view of the world and what's not real.

And that that's all illusion, disillusion, reality, unreality.

That's all wrapped up in this story, so I really like that.

- Well, I wanna say that I think that they're perfectly coincident.

In other words, I think it's the same question.

So I think it's beautiful, and what you've said makes me think, what are other elements in this novel that prove to be illusory that would initially have presented itself as really the fundament of reality?

So for instance, you mentioned the entire social structure.

- Mm-hm.

- This is the social structure that Dr. Urbino gives his entire life to.

He dedicates his life to these civic initiatives, to these scientific projects, et cetera, to detoxifying the cholera-causing water.

He invests his life in those things.

And this novel, I think, raises the real possibility that compared to the love that Florentino and Fermina experience, everything that Dr. Urbino invested his life in is an illusion.

- Yeah, yeah.

And I would also add in there the Catholic Church and the structures of the Catholic Church, that the same trajectory follows through this story.

- That's why I mentioned the courtly love.

This book, without ever saying so, is, well, as he says about Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he was a saint who was an atheist.

"Is there anything less likely?"

he says, and it turns out, I would propose, that Florentino is a saint of love who doesn't believe in God.

It's very clear he doesn't believe in God.

He says as much.

At the end there when he's trying to find his virility, when his manhood is failing him on the moment of consummation, he prays, Oh, excuse me, this is when he goes to meet Fermina, and his stomach revolts on him, and he has to abort early because he has this, basically he gets to the carriage or to the car.

Let's just call it what it is.

He had a stomach issue that culminated in diarrhea, and he was going to pray that it didn't happen, but it occurred to him that he didn't believe in God.

And he remembered some little kind of ditty that you could say before you, In other words, he doesn't believe in God.

What you just said, I'm saying that this book, without ever saying so, is saying, you know what?

That entire super structure that you fantasized that relates to some kind of divine being that sits on a throne is an illusion.

But this, what's happening between these two old people, that's real.

- Mm-hm, yeah.

- I think that's the line that it puts in the sand.

This is an artist who is ultimately not really splitting eternity with the church.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Now you could imagine people that understand Christianity in such a way where that's not offensive because they don't imagine that it has to be an either or kind of thing.

They may understand, in other words, they may understand God as imminent, as transcendent, and in a very incarnational way, which includes every facet of the body.

So I don't wanna say that this novel is anti-Christian, but it is very clearly anti-organized religion.

And for the very reason I think that you just said, Steve, that it is not real.

- [Steve] Mm-hm.

- And it proves itself not real the way everything in this novel I think proves itself whether it's real or not, and that is, does it have authority over death?

In other words, death is an authority.

Is there anything other than death that has greater authority?

And I think this novel says, yes, there is one thing.

There is true love and that it has authority over death, that this is the last authority.

And then you could say, "Well, that's crazy, and I don't believe it."

Well, that's great.

You've made your pick, You know what I mean?

Rejecting that is accepting something else, right?

'Cause if you say, "I don't believe any of that.

I believe in science," okay, well that's what you've picked.

And the question you're gonna be facing is this question all of us are facing, is, what is the power of science in the face of death?

And this novel answers it, I think, pretty clearly.

It is impotent.

And, Go ahead, Steve.

- Does that question come back to Urbino running up the ladder after that parrot?

- Well, there you go because he- - I'm just thinking of that, is like he reaches and reaches.

He just keeps climbing and reaching for the next thing, the next beautiful thing.

And in the end, that's an illusion, and he falls and dies.

- There you go.

And wouldn't that bring us back to the Tower of Babel?

And wouldn't that have something to do with the fact that his last words to his wife was, "Only God knows how much I loved you."

- Yeah, yeah.

- Which means he failed.

There was something he did not communicate in the time that he was allotted.

He failed, you could say, with regards to love, okay.

I don't know about science or to his city, but in so far as love has a kind of calling on us, he failed.

And all of his wealth, all of the privilege, all of his intelligence, nevertheless, his fidelity to those things, including the social structure, as you pointed out, it was clearly exploited.

His fidelity to all of that was a choice that he made that proved to, in the face of death, to be less powerful, let's say.

- And he still died.

- And he- - Can I, - Go ahead.

- Can I interject a question in there?

- Please, please.

- Okay, his last words were, "Only God knows how much I loved you."

But then Fermina also has regrets that she expresses that she wishes she could have kept him alive longer so that she could have expressed her own love for him.

- Hm, that's wonderful.

- So where does her failure figure in to the whole picture?

'Cause it takes two.

- Okay.

Yeah, I think that's wonderful.

I'm just gonna, I don't know.

I'm gonna throw my two bits at it, and then you can tell me what you think.

I think that this becomes one of the things that a person has to not look back towards if he or she is going to experience this transcendent love.

In other words, looking back, including our failures, becomes one of the temptations, if you see what I mean.

In other words, she has the temptation where, "I could regret this acknowledged, I wish I had it to do over again."

She could either stay in that cycle, or she could let it go to the present moment, if you see what I mean.

The past could either be a source of sabotage of something that transcends time if we don't let it go, if you see what I mean, that this becomes one of her temptations.

If we're gonna think about the temptations of Christ or the temptations that would keep you from eternity, one of the temptations would be to look back.

Do you see what I mean?

It doesn't mean that she has to pretend that she did it right or to deny it.

Rather I see it, and then I have to let it go now.

This is, I think, a big part of both of their lives, and she's the one most insistent upon it really with regards to their earlier love affair.

"Why," she says, "do you keep looking back to things that don't exist?"

So in a sense, I'm throwing out the possibility that hanging on even to our regrets can be a pitfall, that that's one of the things we're gonna have to let go of if we're going to experience this transcendent.

In other words, if we're gonna move into this domain, let's say the domain that death doesn't have the final authority over, one of the ways that we will be receptive and able to do that is that we would have let go, even of those things.

And imagine the regret of Florentino and the abuse and exploitation of America Vicuna, what he would have to let go of, if you see what I mean, that all of our past are going to be a potential impediment to experiencing the present without it being somehow compromised.

And if we're gonna experience true ecstasy, then that means the things in the past are going to be, well, here's the best way to put it, those things are not gonna pass through the fire.

And that brings us back to Pentecost.

This is the fire that burns up everything that is not love.

And this is the, Go ahead, Steve.

- So the way I understand Pentecost is it's the seventh Sunday after Passover.

So it's seven weeks.

It's 50 days, seven weeks plus one day, the seventh Sunday after Passover.

And in Judaism and elsewhere, that's celebrated with a great feast.

It's when the first, the early wheat harvest comes in in the Middle East.

And it's like the big feast of the year.

And so I think that it's also significant that what Linda just said is she has this regret, but then what does she do, and how does she behave?

And how does she change?

And does she engage in a great feast?

- Well, that's a great way to put.

In other words, is it possible that we're reborn?

And this is an emphasis of the novel, that love, we have a death.

This is why it's so much like cholera, right?

Love kills us in a way.

But what it kills, you could say, is everything in us that's not love, which means we've got something that has been redeemed or saved from the fire, and we can go from there.

I guess that in Judaism, it would be something like the jubilee year or of the forgiveness of all debts after, what is it?

50 years is a jubilee year.

Maybe it's related to this notion.

But in any case, it's the idea that after seven years, if you've been a slave, your debts are paid for.

There's a kind of freedom, in other words, that's built in to the Torah of freedom from debts.

And I'm suggesting that that could be parallel to the possibility that we will have sinned in such a way that grace alone could give us another chance, if you, - And I guess I'm curious, Linda, what you think when Fermina expressed those regrets, and what did she do with that, and does that relate to these themes?

I'm curious what you think of that.

- Well, I guess I was just trying to sort out, he hadn't expressed his love for her.

Although he had internally apparently felt that but knew he had screwed up.

And likewise, she felt the same.

You know, she did move on.

It's just kind of, I was really just thinking in terms of their relationship, what responsibility, maybe is the word, do each of us have in our relationships?

It's not all his fault.

It's not all my fault, her fault, whatever.

It has to be coming, It has to be going both ways.

- Mm-hm.

- And I guess maybe one of the other thoughts I've had about this as you talk all the theme of true love, I guess we've maybe all experienced what we might have thought was true love, and we find out that it wasn't (laughs).

So- - It's an illusion.

- It's an illusion, and so where's, I mean, it's that where's, - That's it, isn't it?

- It's a blessing to find that, that you can really feel confident that you can go up and down the river forever without any interference.

But it is rare.

I think it's rare.

- Right, yeah, it's a good question.

Is it real or not, right?

But what I wanna say about there is the scene where she goes to the grave.

Before she takes this trip with Florentino, she goes to, and has a conversation with her husband.

And so there is that, but then she does say while they're together that it's interesting that you could look back and have thought all of the time that it was love and discovered that it wasn't.

So I think the novel makes it clear that they never really were, They never had love in the sense that Florentino and Fermina experienced it.

And it even says that she got close to her 21st year, and that was the deadline when she was gonna relinquish herself to fate.

And we had learned just before that that her father came to her and said, "We're ruined."

So I think the novel does suggest that there was a kind of expediency in her situation that may have not, not that she was being manipulative, "But here I am.

What am I going to do?"

In any case, I think the bigger question that relates to your comment that it's really got me thinking here is can this thing we're calling love, can it actually cleanse us, so to speak?

Or can we be reborn from all of the things we've done in the past that we would think would disqualify us from that experience?

In other words, because this novel is really preoccupied with looking back and the burden of memory and the way that memory can sabotage the possibility of a present.

In fact, one of the comment that she wasn't going to stew in that maggot broth of memory, this was Jeremiah Saint-Amour's lover, when she learns of his death, how it's over with.

And Dr. Urbino can't understand it, right?

He can't understand how this woman, which I think indicates he really didn't get love.

He didn't really get her love for him and her love for her life, her love for love in a way, 'cause it didn't make sense in a way.

So I'm just saying that I think a theme here is, is it that our past can disqualify us from a new birth?

Or is it possible that this love truly is supernatural even to the point of giving us a second birth or a third birth or a fourth birth?

That in some ways, you can't say this is compared to the past 'cause this is another dimension of existence altogether.

This is new.

This is new because we're in a new dimension.

Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but I think the novel puts it out there in front of us.

- Well, and does it kind of exclude the youth from true love then?

Do you have to go through these things multiple times to go through the fire to refine yourselves?

So does it exclude then true love from- - Yeah, wonderful.

- Youth?

- I think that's wonderful, and I don't know the answer, but I'm gonna throw two bits in here, that Florentino's love was not an illusion.

And the proof of it was the rest of his life.

Now, for Fermina, when she says it was all an illusion, 'cause that's what she tells him when she comes back after they've agreed to be married.

She sees him again, and she instantly knows.

I think for her, that was absolutely right.

In other words, she actually was being completely honest, which explains how it is that she could ever find him again because of her commitment to reality.

And I would wanna say that these two characters are very much associated with, in the case of Fermina, reality.

Every sort of image relates to nature, her disinterest in fashionable things, her not buy into the social structure.

She is grounded in reality that is unusual.

So for her, I think when she says it was illusion, that that was absolutely true.

But my thought is that the novel reveals that for Florentino, it wasn't an illusion.

Go ahead.

- I wonder, I'm trying to think about this, and I'm not sure I'm clear on it, but how many of these relationships is one of the characters living the illusion of love, and the other one's not?

- Help me understand that.

Tell me what you mean.

- So for instance, with Florentino, she has been disillusioned, but he now has the illusion of love.

And before that, it was the opposite.

She had the illusion of love and then found out it wasn't real with Urbino.

I mean, is there some part of this that people move in different directions at different times?

And is there a piece of it that in a relationship, one person may be with an illusion, and the other person is not living with that same illusion?

- Well, I think it's a wonderful question.

What do you think?

I mean, I think it's a wonderful question, and I'm asking myself right now, can I think of any of the relationships that Florentino has that would give us some kind of precedence for understanding this?

And there is this weird comment where he realizes at some point in his life that he could have multiple lovers and love them all the same and be equally faithful.

I mean, there are things in this novel that cut against every grain of anything that you would think of as acceptable.

And there's this wonderful line that he says, one thing that's the case, that nobody teaches life anything, which seems to suggest, I think, that life is far more complicated, ambiguous, contradictory, and even unacceptable to any social structure that you could imagine, whatever social structure.

There will still be a, what does he call it, their secret life?

And isn't this what Fermina discovers after her husband's died, even affairs that potentially that she didn't know about?

And remember at one point he decides not to even ask her if she ever had any affair, but he had wise enough to know that anything that men were doing, women could have done as well.

So I think the novel holds out there is a secret life that consciousness almost can't bear acknowledging and that we either participate in it, or we don't.

Because I think in a way, Dr. Urbino really doesn't participate in it very deeply, which is why he's completely blown away that Jeremiah Saint-Amour had a secret lover and why that discombobulated him so much.

I thought that was, for me, I had several times I'm like, "Why is this discombobulating him so much that this guy had a secret lover?"

And I think it suggests the sort of superficial depth at which he actually was related to the human being, let's say, from the waist down, that he really, there was a sense in which all his commitment to science wasn't taking him very deep when it came to things related to love.

So anyway, I don't have an answer to that except to say maybe every possible permutation, Steve, is part of the mix.

- We've been using the terms illusion and disillusion, and I wonder if we should be actually using illusion and science, or illusion and real.

- So there must be something behind that thought, so what's, - Well, I think Dr. Urbino, he dealt in the real world and was with science and learning and knowledge and that kind of thing.

And he didn't buy into the love and that, and to him, that was an illusion.

But then in the end, maybe he had 'em backwards.

- I think that- - And with the other guy, he was doing the opposite.

He was like the artist, and everything was illusion, and there was no sense of real and whatnot.

- He couldn't even write a business letter, for instance.

- No, he couldn't do, And then in the end, did he kind of flip-flop, too, I mean?

- I think that's exactly it, Steve.

I think that's exactly it.

If you were gonna say, "Where do you stand on this?"

I would say in my two bits, unambiguously, that Dr. Urbino lived an illusion.

And Florentino not only didn't live an illusion, he lived a life that bore fruit in the form of this novel itself.

In other words, there's two sort of parallel tracks going on.

This is a relationship between Florentino and Fermina, but there is also this very important, not even subtext, you could just say parallel text, of the power of language to communicate this love.

And think about the moment whenever she, when her husband's dead at the time of the funeral, he comes and professes his undying love to her.

She's in an absolute rage.

She says she never wants to see him again and sends him a letter basically to go F off.

And he took it as his great opportunity for which he has heretofore lived his life because this letter was warranting a response.

And all of his reading, all of his love-letter writing, all of his commitment to literature, was now about to either pay off because he was going to be able to respond in a way that was gonna win her heart, or he was going to fail, if you see what I mean.

If this is a story of a kind of knight of love, and there is something that he has to slay, he's gonna slay it with his pen, or in this case, a typewriter.

And one of the things that he emphasizes is that he has to, he has to have her understand that love is the alpha and omega, that it is not a means to anything.

This is the novel, that love is an end in itself because if she can believe that, then she has an opportunity for a new life, if you see what I mean.

Her husband's gone.

What is her future gonna look like?

If she's got X number of years left, is she going to, Here she's in a position of a widow.

Is that it?

Or is there a possibility, in other words, of another life that she's not too old for, that she's in no way disqualified for.

And the only way she is going to take a step towards that idea is if she's convinced of it.

And the only way she can be convinced of it is through his words, if you see what I mean.

So I'm suggesting that there's a kind of proof here.

If we have a hypothesis, which of these two is illusory and real, I'm proffering the idea that the novel says that this love is real and that the proof of it is this novel itself, that it itself would have to be to us like the letter was to Fermina, if you see what I mean, that love is not believable.

But you read this novel, and you start to think, well, maybe it is believable.

Do you see what I mean?

That maybe the evidence, in other words, is in the language and that this is- - So is there, Is there an underlying question in this novel that really the whole book could be summed up as what's real and what is unreal, and how do you tell the difference?

- I think so, and I would add one thing to it.

And the test is fire.

This goes right to the heart of Western intellectual and imaginative tradition, isn't it?

That gold is what passes through the fire?

- [Steve] Mm-hm.

- And this brings us to another dimension of just the crown because the crown, or like the halo, represents some kind of light or transcendent light that we imagine comes from.

And he calls her the crowned goddess.

In other words, is it possible, in other words, that our body is a kind of receptacle of this thing called love that reason will never understand, but that it proves itself in the pudding?

In other words, that it doesn't have to always be a hypothesis that if you act on this, you will have affirmation because you will experience it.

Now, you couldn't prove to somebody without experiencing it, if you see what I mean.

But if you experience it, you won't have any doubt which is illusion or what is not illusion.

In other words, at the end of the novel, I don't believe Fermina has any doubts about whether this is real with Florentino or not.

- So just a quick question about Florentino's journey then during that period where he was experiencing every possible permutation, combination of love and physical love.

Was he at the same time perhaps testing with the idea that perhaps he would, maybe there's another true love possibility out there, since Fermina's taken with the, married, not available, you know?

- He proposes different sort of reasons, one, that he is trying to satisfy himself.

He said he's kind of medicating himself.

That's one possibility.

One, is- - Just a physical, just taking care of his physical needs.

- He's just trying to not feel pain.

He's substituting this for something.

He says that, and he also says at one point that he believed that, this is the idea that as long as you were still sort of, if you use it, you won't lose it, so that this was actually a way that he would be prepared.

I mean, he says as much, that as long as you could still, you know.

I think he's giving himself all kinds of reasons why.

But one thing that comes to mind when you say that is I think he's learning.

I think this is part of his tutelage.

This is his apprenticeship.

He is learning about things that Dr. Urbino didn't even imagine existed.

Do you see what I mean?

These various, what you might think of from a certain perspective, as these strange sexual perversions if you wanna call 'em, and the book is really, I think, wonderful in the way that it captures these different ways that people make love and kind of ways that make you go, "Oh God, I don't know if I can read that."

And then you go, "Ugh, I can't pretend that I've never imagined something that crazy."

Any case, I think in other words, that he is learning something about this underground world, if we wanna call it that.

He's learning something about depths of human nature, that the social structure Steve referred to simply does not allow us to acknowledge out loud.

- So why does he have to go through all of that?

He's learning about human nature.

He's learning about his own nature, and it's all, like I say, it feels like it's the waiting period, since you find out at the end that he does get together with Fermina.

It's like the hero's journey in some ways in a real weird way.

- Absolutely.

I think it's exactly like that.

This is the hero's journey if you imagine instead of someone trying to be a saint related to organized religion, for Christ, this is someone who's a saint for what we would think of as Eros or carnal love.

And that absolutely, I mean, how many ways is he compared to a rabbi, to hermeticism, to some kind of spartan existence?

He lives like a monk, doesn't he?

I mean, in all ways, he has paired it, Like the Apostle Paul, do you throw off all the things that encumber you and run the race before you?

He has denuded himself of virtually everything that's an impediment and not related to Fermina.

- He has shed every illusion.

- There, I think that is right, that he has shed everything that is not in the service of this love.

And the question of why he has to do it, well, I don't know.

That is a great question.

But I would think that all of that tutelage, let's call it, prepared him to write the letter that he said all of his life he was waiting for this opportunity.

In other words, what he was gonna put when he sat down with that typewriter, what was gonna come out of that was going to be influenced by every single thing that he experienced.

And then she perceived in that a degree of wisdom.

And I'm not certain that she would have had that experience had he had been as juvenile as juvenile Urbino.

Do you see what I mean?

- Or if he had just been sending her another poem from his earlier life- - There you go.

- In the earlier part of their relation.

He had been through all these other experiences, which provided him with the depth to be able to go there that he wouldn't have had- - Wonderful.

- Had everything just gone smooth for them from the start.

- That seems exactly right to me, that he would not have grown had he not had all of, including all the bad things you could imagine, maybe even including America Vicuna.

I don't know.

But I do want to just throw out the idea that you're saying, that it was those experiences that led to the difference between what she perceived in his letters.

- Mm-hm.

- And likewise, she grew through the experiences that she had so that she was ready for him.

- I would agree, and also that she was partly instructing him.

I mean, her grounding in reality was partly crucial to his letting go, you know what I mean?

That she ended up being an important instructor.

Even her rejection of everything that struck, that had a scent because her gift was the nose.

Every scent of nostalgia she rejected as illusory.

So I'm gonna agree with you that she was absolutely having her own Bildungsroman.

It was the sentimental education, I think is Flaubert's term for it, or perhaps it's Russo.

But it's the education of love, that this is the education of love and that they had different educational trajectories, understandably, coming from different places in the world.

And if I were to throw my two bits at what hers had to do with, it had partly had to do with rage, particularly at a patriarchal world that had subordinated her at every turn, that there was a kind of built-in rage that could itself have been an impediment to her experiencing love had she not gotten through that rage, in other words.

And the novel, I mean, this is so brilliant when he suggested beneath the rage was a feeling of guilt, that she felt if that she was to blame at something, she responded with this rage.

And the novel makes very clear in the ending that that sense of being guilty lifts from her and disappears, that she experiences a freedom, in other words, where she no longer felt that she was to be blamed for any number of things.

Do you see what I mean?

There's a kind of existential guilt that she had come out on the other end of that I think was part of her educational trajectory.

Steve, what do you got?

- Is that the moment she owns her reality and that the illusions have all been lifted?

- Well, I'd have to, I don't know.

That's a great question.

I'd have to go back and see if that moment is tied in in that way.

But certainly it enabled the two of them, let's say, to go back and forth forever.

In other words, I'm gonna propose the novel suggests that they achieve eternity.

That's the name of the town, La Dorada, gold in La Dorada.

There's the gold.

There's all kind of gold in this novel, but only one gold turns out to be real, and that's the gold the two of them bring up like the sunken galleon, right?

The real gold of that galleon.

And we're coming here to a close,.

To add to our images of fire coming down and of a communication that transcends nature, we can't obviously walk away without thinking about the river.

And here is a just an image of time.

Life flows.

Time flows.

Ultimately this is the river that you're either going to drown under, or you're gonna move across, as in above it.

In other words, when he finally tells her, "Take a boat," this is how we're going to get across this river of death.

It's this kind of love that's gonna enable us not to sink, in other words.

This is what, You see the same thing in "Gatsby" when he gets on a pneumatic mattress, and he has a hydroplane.

The novel puts this idea that there's a spirit on top of the water, and that when we move on the spirit, we do not sink beneath the waves.

If we don't move on that spirit, then what happens?

Like Peter, we drown.

If we move with the spirit, we walk on water.

And I wanna- - It took me a minute.

It took me a minute, but I'm getting it.

It's the River Styx, and they're crossing to eternity together.

- I think absolutely.

- [Steve] Absolutely.

- I think the captain is the ferryman.

And he gets awful interesting mythological dimensions, doesn't he?

At the end of the novel, the captain starts, Things get very, very interesting at the end of the novel, and I would have to keep dealing with it, but one thought I've had here is that the captain may be the author.

In other words, Marquez may be closer to the captain, and Florentino really might be the Holy Spirit because the most important moments, people recognize that in crucial moments, no pun intended, he speaks with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Everyone recognizes it.

The captain at the end takes his command, so to speak, from Florentino.

The guy lives kind of like a make-believe world.

Except in certain instances, he speaks with an authority that all of a sudden, and my thought is, okay, maybe Marquez isn't Florentino exactly because whoever wrote this novel, so to speak, isn't Marquez exactly, if you see what I mean.

If we're gonna play with the idea that something divine comes to a writer that enables him or her to speak with an authority that transcends even death, then that would suggest that who wrote this novel, we couldn't answer it with an ordinary who, if you see what I mean, that Marquez contributed to it.

But something else came down, let's say, and added the fire or the wind that elevated it into another dimension.

And so I'm just saying that the ferryman here in a way might be the book itself, that this is like the boat that can move on water.

And the proof his entire life as an artist might be whether this floats or not, if you see what I mean, that his entire proof of whether he lived up to his calling has to do with this vessel right here.

And whether or not we move with this vessel may have something to do with our own reading.

One of the things, and we can close with this, Julie, one of the things that Fermina says to her son when he asked, "How do you know this man?"

She says, "He taught me to read."

Now that's not true because she was already teaching scholastica in Latin.

She was teaching her.

But the answer she gives to her son is that "He was teaching me to read," suggests that there is a role to be played for the reader in this novel in learning how to read in such a way that you can hear that spirit moving through these letters.

What does the epigraph say?

"The words I'm about to express, they now have their own crowned goddess."

There you go.

There I think is someone saying that the Holy Spirit is about to move through these words.

That's a pretty strong sort of overture, I would say.

I wanna thank Linda and Steve and Julie.

This is so much fun when you just get together and let the book get a word in edgewise and then let our imaginations play around.

I think really we're just playing around with these words and letting something that none of us independently would have thought perhaps without each other.

And I really think that indicates what kind of community can come to fruition in relationship with literature that might not with other kinds of things.

You could imagine us sitting here to talk about politics or religion, and we might not arrive at some kind of collaborative effort where no one has to have the last word.

We might find ourselves divided in certain kind of ways.

So I do think that this conversation is a little bit of an example of how we can come together, set our egos aside, and learn from each other, both from our life experiences and our experiences with the work of art.

So thank you, guys, for making this so much fun for me.

- Yes, thank you, thank you so much.

And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you go to the Austin Public Library, aplmn.org, to check out the podcast that we did, to the two podcasts that are related to this book, and the other lectures as well.

So, thank you very much.

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