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We Cannot, Must Not Empathize With Hate
Hate cannot be loved into submission. Hate must be hated.
The world had been sad since Tuesday.
This is how Gabriel García Márquez begins his story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” And never has a sentence felt so prophetic, so precise.
Márquez writes of a seaside town in a dreamlike state where a family must daily battle the crabs inundating their home seeking refuge from a days-long rainstorm.
“The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”
It was in this light that Pelayo crossed his courtyard to throw the crabs into the sea. Upon his return, he discovered a wondrous being, a very old man with fantastical features.
“He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.”
In this story, Márquez, a master of magical realism, which pirouettes between the physical and the fantastical, satirizes our attempt to familiarize the extraordinary. Pelayo gets his wife to show her the man in their…
