Confronting Self

I reflect today on a beautiful and amazing passage in the book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, by Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez.  I am still reading this the first of his books for me to read. I was drawn to it by the great title and the fascination to hear the story of a 90 year old man unfold. The passage reminded of how so often we escape from our inner-self or our true-self for much of our lives and all the illusions and veils we place over our lives, we always stand naked to everyone else. A reminder to seek our true selves with each breath, each day, since we all will not be awarded the luxury that this fictional character was awarded at the age of 90, the ability to find the true meaning love.

Reading the passage will provide much greater insight than anything I can write to introduce it.

“Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a completed system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I leaned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”