Sociology

Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude tend to file Fernanda del Carpio under the unbearable one and move on. It is an understandable reflex and a small act of cowardice, because she is the character in the book whose conduct is most easily defended on paper. She keeps the house clean. She protects the family name. She enforces mourning, decency, schedules, prayer. Almost everything she does can be justified by a principle, and almost everything she does causes damage. Gabriel García Márquez built her as a machine for demonstrating that those two facts are compatible. …

Ask why the week has seven days and most people will shrug, then invent a justification after the fact — something lunar, something biblical. The honest answer is that nobody currently alive decided it, and neither did anyone in living memory, which is exactly the condition under which a decision stops registering as a decision. The calendar, the alphabet, the seven-day week, the nation-state, the categories you reach for without noticing you’re reaching — all of it was built by someone, for a reason, at a moment in history you could in principle point to. And every one of them has reached a state where asking who built it, and why, sounds like a strange question to be asking at all. …

I grew up inside a convenience store, and a convenience store has no holidays. It has shifts. The calendar that organizes most people’s lives — the long exhale of Friday evening, the dread of Monday, the warm collective pause of a holiday — never reached behind the counter. Christmas was a high-traffic day; people who forgot something always needed somewhere open. New Year’s Eve sold ice and cigarettes. A Saturday was a Tuesday with more beer. My parents never asked, “any plans for the weekend?” because there was no weekend. There was only what we call, with no irony at all, business as usual. …