Psychology

Almost everyone past forty knows the type. The man still operating, in some quiet operative sense, as if he were twenty-four. The woman whose romantic life consists of the same three patterns it consisted of in 2009. The friend whose career has had the right surface motion — promotions, titles, perfectly photographed dinners — but whose inner question, who am I when no one is watching, has not seriously been asked since adolescence. They are not failures. Some of them are extraordinarily successful. They are simply, in the part that matters, not yet adults. ...

In Enlightenment and Madness I argued that José Arcadio Buendía wasn’t mad in the way Macondo thought he was — that the patriarch tied to the chestnut tree was another face of the same transcendence that lifts Remedios la Bella into the sky. Two exits from ordinary consciousness, one serene, one savage. A reader — my mother, actually — pushed back on that with a sharp question. If he had lived today, she asked, would you still call it wisdom, or would you just put him on a medication and send him home? ...