Enlightenment and Madness: Rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude
Rereading Cien años de soledad after many years, I found myself less drawn to the Buendía dynasty’s epic sweep than to two characters at opposite poles of the novel: Remedios la Bella, who ascends bodily into the sky while folding sheets, and José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch who dies tied to a chestnut tree, speaking Latin to the ghosts only he can see. Both escape Macondo. Both leave ordinary reality behind. But they do so from diametrically opposite directions — one upward into serenity, the other downward into madness. The more I thought about it, the more this looked like a question Buddhism has wrestled with for centuries: what separates enlightenment from craziness, and are they really opposites at all? ...