Eucatastrophe Reader

The Age of Opportunity

The Age of Opportunity REVIEW

This book would make a good user’s manual to the teenage brain. I would recommend it if you are a school teacher, a principal, a college Human Growth & Development instructor, a parent, a grandparent, a person working in juvenile justice, or, drum roll please, a teenager yourself. It seems like everyone would stand to benefit from an understanding of the neurological and hormonal causes for phenomena that human beings have observed in their young for thousands of years.

A character in one of Shakespeare’s plays puts it this way:

“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—Hark you now. Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?”

One of the great benefits of reading this book is that you learn how to celebrate the adolescent brain rather than just complain about it. The adolescent brain, you come to realize, is a brain that has made logical compromises in the pursuit of legitimate ends. There are benefits to its features that make it worth the problems it causes. And if teenagers wrote books about the adult brain (maybe they should), they should write it in such a way that it was made clear that the advantages of the adult brain were “dearly bought” and maybe not worth the price.

Steinberg begins the book by making a claim central to his argument. The adolescent brain is doing what it is doing for a reason, and it should be celebrated for doing it so well. It is not simply a “crippled brain.” It is developing on a schedule. “Studies are showing that adolescence is a second period of heightened brain plasticity,” Steinberg writes,

“just like the first three years of life. This makes adolescence a really vulnerable time—because the brain can be damaged by harmful experiences—but it also makes it a time of tremendous opportunity.”

Thus, the title of the book.

What is important to note however is that different parts of the brain will be more “plastic” at different points in life and that the adolescent brain is not developing all over again. It is making its way toward a goal and developing in ways new to the organism that sustains it.  The author writes:

“There is a time lag between the activation of brain systems that excite our emotions and impulses and the maturation of brain systems that allow us to check these feelings and urgings—it’s like driving a car with a sensitive gas pedal and bad brakes.”

Imagine for a moment going to buy a new car and the dealer says to you, “This car is a fantastic car. You are going to love it. But you should know that it is brand new and will need a little time to get fully synced up. Don’t be surprised if the accelerator is a little more sensitive to pressure than you are used to. And do not be surprised if the brakes are a little less responsive than you are used to. Those features will balance out in time.”

Would you buy that car? Would you let your teenager drive it?

That is essentially what Dr. Steinberg is saying is going on with your teenager (if you have one) or your students (if you have them) or yourself (if you are still a teen). The author argues that the adolescent brain is just more primed for experiences. It responds more intensely to things, to love, to rejection, to thrills, to losses, to food, to touch, to all of life’s epicurean pleasures, including drugs, alcohol, and risk-taking. Consider from your own experience if this is true:

“As a result, the adolescent brain is chemically primed to encode memories more deeply. The [emotion bump] doesn't exist because more emotional events take place in adolescence, but because ordinary events trigger stronger emotions”

The adolescent brain is going to be as aware of its environment as it is ever going to be for the rest of its life. It makes sense that this is so because it is literally preparing itself for the environment that it is soon going to have to come to terms with and live in. It is for this reason that putting adolescents in direct contact with dysfunctional environments is particularly damaging because it is literally furiously in the process of sculpting itself to adapt to that environment. Steinberg expresses this profound idea in the following paragraph:

“Plasticity opens the brain's windows to the outside world, but open windows can let in pollen, noise, and mosquitoes just as easily as ocean breezes, birdsong, and the fragrance of flowers. When these windows are open especially wide, as they are in infancy and adolescence, we must be especially attentive to what comes in through them.”

The ironic thing is that you actually have more plasticity as an infant and adolescent than you will have as an adult. This is the consequence of what maturing actual does in a human brain. It starts with almost unlimited connections and then begins to “prune.” Becoming an adult does not happen because you are gaining neural connections exponentially. It happens because you begin to remove connections that are irrelevant to the circumstances in which you live. “At one year Of age,” Steinberg informs us,

“there are about twice as many connections between neurons as there are in the adult brain. Pruning makes the brain function more effectively, the way that thinning a tree allows the remaining branches to grow stronger. It's part of a more extensive process through which the circuitry of the brain is remodeled through which connections between neurons are created, strengthened, weakened, or eliminated.”

The more that an adolescent brain can come in contact with the environment that it will be functioning in as an adult, the better chance it has of sculpting the perfect brain for that environment. [“Why then, I find myself asking, do we put teenagers in buildings hermetically sealed from the “real world”?] The science on this seems to be clear:

“The developing brain is chemically predisposed to be modified by experiences, like clay when it is still soft, whereas the adult brain is predisposed to resist modification--like clay once it is hardened."

Would this not suggest that maybe we should be mentoring students out in the world as they confront real world problems rather than secluding them in safe-zones where the real world can barely be seen out the windows? Is this an argument for homeschooling? Or for some other paradigm worth inventing? “We learn how to regulate ourselves by being regulated,”

Steinberg explains the process by which that clay “hardens” by digging a little deeper into the structures of neurons as they develop. Early in their development, they carry electrical charges that have the ability to “leap” in a wide variety of directions, like a copper wire carrying electricity without any plastic covering. Over time, those neurons are encased in myelin (the plastic in the wire illustration) and that myelin covering reduces the amount of random connection making and enforces the strengths of desired pathways (lets call them a bat swing, a tune played on a piano, or a paintbrush stroke). As the young person decides what language they will speak, what skills they will need, what patterns of behavior will work to their advantage in life, the myelin surrounding neural pathways begins to work in favor of the desired learning being done by thickening and thus begins to “discourage” random “creativity.” “The amount of myelin in the brain increases well into our late forties,” says Steinberg, “insulating more and more brain circuits as we mature. “Axons retract, spines die off, and as a result, synapses start to disappear, often to the point that the circuit finally ceases to exist. This process is called ‘synaptic pruning.’”

“Ahhh,” says the mature grown-up. “That is what is wrong with the teenage brain.” Too much distractability. Not enough focus.”

“To the contrary,” says the teenager, “that is what is wrong with you old people. You are stuck in ruts!”  

Steinberg neither puts the adolescent brain on a pedestal nor condemns it. It is what it is, and it has a long history of becoming what it is, and we are not going to change it by offering a few classes on executive function as though just knowing what your brain is doing is going to keep it from doing what it is doing. And yet, the author is not fatalistic. There are wise courses of action to take and unwise courses of action to take. He encourages working with the developing brain, not trying to subject it to torture like some cognitive version of Chinese foot-binding or Victorian era corset wearing.

 Here are some recommendations.

First, don’t ignore the adolescent brain’s strengths or its weaknesses if you are someone who has some responsibility for helping teenagers mature. Make yourself familiar with the processes going on within and work with them, not against them. [This appeals to my inner Daoist]. “We learn how to regulate ourselves by being regulated,” he writes.

Second, recognize that the adolescent brain needs challenges to grow and develop. It does that developmental process no good to lock it up and protect it from the environment just as it does it no good to pretend that it does not need protection for its vulnerabilities. External regulation is essential as the adolescent brain learns to make use of its own “brakes.” “The slight mismatch between what we can do and what we push ourselves to do,” Steinberg writes,

“is what stimulates brain development. If the mismatch isn’t there or if it’s so great as to be overwhelming, development won’t occur.”

“In other words, it is important to be exposed to novelty and challenge when the brain is plastic not only because this is how we acquire and strengthen skills, but because this is how the brain maintains its ability to profit from future enriching experiences.”

“We know that brain plasticity in adulthood is facilitated by a mismatch between what the environment demands of the brain and what the brain can do. The less often we put ourselves in novel situations, the less frequently we encounter these mismatches. When this happens, and when the need to learn new things becomes less and less pressing, the brain begins to lose some of its malleability.”

Hear that. If challenges are made too easy or if the challenges are all artificial and disconnected from the real world in which teenagers live, “development won’t occur.” That is a tragedy and a tragedy that is compounded by the fact that the brain will literally activate that myelin hardening process when it begins to believe that the days of new experiences are over. The following paragraph has stunning implications for the way that we educate our teenagers:  

“When we leave adolescence and stop seeking out new experiences, our brains shut down the final period of extensive plasticity. . . . Once we have what we need to survive on our own, it doesn't make any sense to remain malleable enough to be potentially harmed by unfavorable experiences.”

In other words, the worse thing we can do to a developing teenage brain is put it in an environment that causes that brain to think, “There is nothing new of any significance to learn.” At that moment, the cascade of “closing” the window begins, possibly for good.

Third, the author stresses that the learning of adolescents is inevitably affected by social forces. And this is not accidental or insignificant. The adolescent brain is wired for intensity of experience and seeks them out voraciously. But experiments demonstrate that the power and attractiveness of experiential rewards are magnified in the presence of other peers. An adult might look at a certain risk and say “The reward for that risk is not worth it.” And there conclusions about that estimate will not be affected by whether or not their friends are with them. But an adolescent will look at that exact same risk and reward combination and they will respond to the reward because it feels bigger than it does to the adult. As if that is not “bad enough” that reward will seem even sweeter if other adolescents are in the room … or even if they are in some other room.

“Things that feel good, feel better in adolescence,” Steinberg writes, “and things that feel bad, feel worse.”

“Compared to children or adults, it is easier to get adolescents to gamble even when their odds of winning are small or uncertain . . . Adolescents are just as likely as adults to know what's risky and what isn't, and no worse than adults at estimating whether doing something risky will lead to a bad consequence. . . . As this research shows, teenagers are fully capable of identifying risks; they're just drawn more strongly to rewards.”

Read on …

“Official statistics provide plenty of confirmation for our personal recollections: the presence of a group of teenage passengers in a car when a teenager is behind the wheel more than quadruples the chance of a crash and the risks of a crash increase sharply with each additional teen who is in the car.”

“Even when we make it impossible for teenagers to communicate with each other—that is, impossible to pressure each other into taking risks—simply knowing that their friends are nearby makes them take more chances.”

“In other words, it's not necessarily overt peer pressure that leads adolescents to do more reckless things with their friends. It's that being around friends when you are a teenager makes everything feel so good that you become even more sensitive to rewards than you ordinarily are, which leads you to take chances you would not ordinarily take.”

Why this is so is a matter of some conjecture but maybe the author puts his finger on it when he writes: “It hurts to be rejected at any age, but it's actually more painful during adolescence than at any other time.”

Ironically, Steinberg has more positive things to say about the adolescent brain than he has to say about the way adults in our present culture design systems to screw up those brains even more. “I don't harbor any delusions about the use of scientific evidence to inform policymaking, though,” he opines, “Policymakers and advocacy groups use science the way that drunks use lampposts – for support, not illumination.”

Eventually, we all do begin to “grow up” and for good or bad, “get with the program.” A few teenagers will remain teenagers as long as they can. Some will become rock stars or will film themselves for money like the producers of the TV show, “Jackass.” A few will remind us, Peter Pan like, that childhood and adolescence is to be preferred to adulthood and self-regulatory behavior in cubicle jobs. Maybe this is something of a service? I loved the illustration the author gave of a children’s soccer game where 22 kids run around the field within spitting distance of each other, an unorganized human stampede of randomness that follows the ball wherever it goes. I imagined coaching kids like that and trying to help them understand their “positions” on the field and the structures of intelligent play. This is, to some extent what we do when we raise young people to become responsible adults.

And yet, God, don’t those little kids have fun!”

Question for Comment: If there were some drug that would allow your brain to return to it adolescent form for a year, would you take it? Why or why not?

"While the other instruments played for everyone, the violin played for her alone.”

Life in a Time of Cholera REVIEW

The Center of It

The times you’re gone
I carry on
The times you’re here
I covet
Yet either day or night, I find you
At the center of it.

And when you’re near
I like it
But when you're felt
I love it
No matter what circumference,
You’re at the center of it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel Love in a Time of Cholera provides us with an epic story of star-crossed lovers whose relationship unfolds over a lifetime. Spoiler alert. For fifty years of their relationship, they never speak to one another alone. I know. Painful, right? In so many ways, the novel is a retelling of the themes in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s 18^th Century novel Julie: The New Heloise, where a young man of deep romantic proclivities has the misfortune to latch on to someone who eventually decides to follow her “enlightened” father’s “sensible side” rather than her own Rumi-esque intuitive romantic side. It is interesting to compare the two main characters, Florentino and Fermina's, experience of "centering” and “de-centering."

Early on in their relationship, Fermina recognizes that she has become the focus of Florentino’s blazing white-hot attention.

“She also knew that he was one of the musicians in the choir, and although she never dared raise her eyes to look at him during Mass, she had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone, the violin played for her alone.”

But she is cautious and reticent to reciprocate in any way that one might regard “in kind.” He is a place-marker for her. A “possibility” if some other planet does not come along before she is twenty-one (for her, the drop-dead date for finding a partner) to pull her into her life’s orbit.   

A number of passages suggest that Florentino never manages to "evict her" from the center of his relational life after she “ghosts him” (to use a modern parlance) for Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the city’s “most eligible bachelor.” These passages also suggests that Fermina really never put him at the center of her life in the first place (at least not until she is well into her old age). Here are a few select quotes from the novel that suggest just how central Fermina is to Florentino even after she sets him clearly outside the circle of her affections and even concern.

"But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line."

“Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of her.”

“Florentino Ariza never had another opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chance encounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.”

“That was always the case: any event, good or bad, had some relationship to her."

“The truth is that he was never the same again. Winning back Fermina Daza was the sole purpose of his life, and he was so certain of achieving it sooner or later that he convinced Transito Ariza to continue with the restoration of the house so that it would be ready to receive her whenever the miracle took place.”

“In truth, he always behaved as if he were the eternal husband of Fermina Daza, an unfaithful husband but a tenacious one . . .”

Even when Florentino is introduced to the world of other women on a riverboat one night, he discovers that Fermina is not a disposable concern for him. 

“He saw them [including the woman he slept with] round the corner of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby's cage, and soon afterward he saw them ascend along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life. Then he felt alone in the world, and the memory of Fermina Daza, lying in ambush in recent days, dealt him a mortal blow.”

“Never again would he abandon the city of Fermina Daza.”

As the author puts it, Florentino Ariza longed “to enjoy his martyrdom.”

Fermina, on the other hand, prefers stability to passion and is willing to call the first, even sans the second, “love.” Like Julie in Rousseau's Julie, the New Heloise, she selects that candidate who is "the most stable and offers the most stability" willing to take a risk on the presence of something with heat in it. She decides, much in line with her father’s perspective, that a woman should marry for love’s benefits, not for love.

“One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”

“That afternoon, while her father was taking his siesta, she sent [Florentino] Gala Placidia with a two-line letter: ‘Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.’"

“Poor man!”

Fermina seems to be conscious that some motive other than romantic love motivates Dr. Urbino in his advances. “Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman with whom he would live until the day of his death,” Gabriele Garcia Marquez tells us. At one point Marquez reveals a secret about Fermina that not even she knows until she is many years a widow: “She did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happened to her in her life.”

It is as the author has declared himself in no uncertain terms, the champion of his romantic protagonist and a detractor of his female lead. His assertion here is somewhat staggering really. HE is suggesting that until you meet a person who rocks your world,” nothing of significance has happened to you and by logical inference, if you do not have that person in your life right now, you are not really alive. That is an assertion worthy of some reflection!

Florentino, unable or unwilling to decenter Fermina from the sun-like role she plays in his emotional solar system, can only visualize a life where her new husband eventually dies so that Fermina, repentant, reciprocates his love and centers him as he has always centered her. He cannot imagine a world where this does not happen. Listen to him grieve on the day that Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino marry.

“He knew that she was to have an elaborate wedding, and then the being who loved her most, who would love her forever, would not even have the right to die for her. Jealousy, which until that time had been drowned in weeping, took possession of his soul. He prayed to God that the lightning of divine justice would strike Fermina Daza as she was about to give her vow of love and obedience to a man who wanted her for his wife only as a social adornment, and he went into rapture at the vision of the bride, his bride or no one's, lying face up on the flagstones of the Cathedral, her orange blossoms laden with the dew of death, and the foaming torrent of her veil covering the funerary marbles of the fourteen bishops who were buried in front of the main altar. Once his revenge was consummated, however, he repented of his own wickedness, and then he saw Fermina Daza rising from the ground, her spirit intact, distant but alive, because it was not possible for him to imagine the world without her. He did not sleep again, and if at times he sat down to pick at food, it was in the hope that Fermina Daza would be at the table or, conversely, to deny her the homage of fasting for her sake. At times his solace was the certainty that during the intoxication of her wedding celebration, even during the feverish nights of her honeymoon, Fermina Daza would suffer one moment, one at least but one in any event, when the phantom of the sweetheart she had scorned, humiliated, and insulted would appear in her thoughts, and all her happiness would be destroyed.”

Much later, Florentino meets Dr. Urbino and discovers that the man is not necessarily evil just because he “stole his girl.” This only makes it unfortunate that he has to die. “Florentino Ariza could not endure the pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in order for him to be happy,” Marquez writes.

For a brief time, Florentino tries to insulate himself from his loss by putting geographical distance between him and Fermina Urbino. The attempt is only marginally successful though, for wherever Florentino goes, memories of Fermina follow. When Florentino soon gives up his attempt at escaping his attachment’s tractor beam, he returns to the city of Fermina Daza and he makes an intentional choice to keep her at the center of his relational universe.

“The bay was calm at daybreak. Above the floating mist Florentino Ariza saw the dome of the Cathedral, gilded by the first light of dawn, he saw the dovecotes on the flat roofs, and orienting himself by them, he located the balcony of the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, where he supposed that the lady of his misfortune was still dozing, her head on the shoulder of her satiated husband. That idea broke his heart, but he did nothing to suppress it; on the contrary, he took pleasure in his pain. The sun was beginning to grow hot as the mail sloop made its way through the labyrinth of sailing ships that lay at anchor where the countless odors from the public market and the decaying matter on the bottom of the bay blended into one pestilential stench. The schooner from Riohacha had just arrived, and gangs of stevedores in water up to their waists lifted the passengers over the side and carried them to shore. Florentino Ariza was the first to jump on land from the mail sloop, and from that time on he no longer detected the fetid reek of the bay in the city, but was aware only of the personal fragrance of Fermina Daza. Everything smelled of her.”

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love,” Florentino’s father had once written in a letter found in a box in the attic. This seems to be such a profound distillation of Florentino’s philosophy and central nervous system that Florentino believes that it is a line he must have written himself. We might say that Florentino’s life is the result of believing his father. We could say the same of Fermina, for though she defies her father for a time, in the end, she does exactly what her father wants, and marries exactly the man that her father would have (and did) arrange for her. Fermina does what Rousseau’s Julie does: She “falls in line with a parental desire for stability” rather than “falling in love with an self-identified love interest.” “No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations could have any reason not to be happy,” the author notes when describing how the world would have described Fermina and Juvenal’s marriage.

“During those unfortunate years no one could have imagined anyone happier than they or a marriage more harmonious than theirs.”

 Marquez describes Fermina’s decision-making process thus:

“But when she had to face the decision of marrying Juvenal Urbino, she succumbed, in a major crisis, when she realized that she had no valid reasons for preferring him after she had rejected Florentino Ariza without valid reasons. In fact, she loved him as little as she had loved the other one, but knew much less about him, and his letters did not have the fervor of the other one's, nor had he given her so many moving proofs of his determination. The truth is that Juvenal Urbino's suit had never been undertaken in the name of love, and it was curious, to say the least, that a militant Catholic like him would offer her only worldly goods: security, order, happiness, contiguous numbers that, once they were added together, might resemble love, almost be love. But they were not love, and these doubts increased her confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live.”

“In any case, the principal factor operating against Dr. Juvenal Urbino was his more than suspect resemblance to the ideal man that Lorenzo Daza [Fermina’s opportunistic and materialistic father] had so wanted for his daughter. It was impossible not to see him as the creature of a paternal plot, even if in reality he was not, but Fermina Daza became convinced that he was from the time she saw him come to her house for a second, unsolicited medical call.”

Fermina Daza decides to put a stable provider at the center of her emotional universe and she crosses her fingers hoping that he will perhaps be more than that. In doing so, she determines, without double-checking, that Florentino could not be a “stable provider” and downgrades his romantic excesses to mere “illusion” anyway. For certainly, her father identifies Florentino’s passionate love in their first conversation and holds it the cheapest of all assets. Fermina marries Juvenal Urbino because he is the best candidate she has been taught to think she has at a time she has been taught to think she must select one.

“But that is what she did at a crucial moment in her life, giving no importance whatsoever to the handsomeness of her suitor, or his legendary wealth, or his youthful glory, or any of his numerous virtues; rather, she was stunned by the fear of an opportunity slipping away, and by the imminence of her twenty-first birthday, which was her private time limit for surrendering to fate. That one moment was enough for her to make the decision that was foreseen in the laws of God and man: until death do you part. Then all her doubts vanished, and she could accomplish without remorse what reason indicated as the most decent thing to do: with no tears, she wiped away the memory of Florentino Ariza, she erased him completely, and in the space that he had occupied in her memory she allowed a field of poppies to bloom. All that she permitted herself was one final sigh that was deeper than usual: "Poor man!"”

Perhaps what Fermina does is what so many people do when they get down to selecting a partner. They mistake the presence of some singular strength or asset for the possession of all necessary strengths and assets. Fermina finds that with all his charm and panache and confidence and intelligence and impeccable pedigree and occupational status and good looks, and education and social capital, Dr. Juvenal Urbino is deeply flawed. “The most fearful doubts began, however, when she returned from her honeymoon,” we read,

“As soon as they opened the trunks, unpacked the furniture, and emptied the eleven chests she had brought in order to take possession as lady and mistress of the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, she realized with mortal vertigo that she was a prisoner in the wrong house and, even worse, with a man who was not.”

“She suspected too late that behind his professional authority and worldly charm, the man she had married was a hopeless weakling: a poor devil made bold by the social weight of his family names.”

“The only possible bond was something as improbable and fickle as love, if there was any, and in their case there was none when they married, and when they were on the verge of inventing it, fate had done nothing more than confront them with reality.”

Later, Fermina describes her marital home as a “deluxe prison sentence.” This negative appraisal is what is most interesting to me about Fermina Daza’s estimation of her life’s great decision. It appears that she, like Rousseau’s Julie, has an emotional regret about choosing the wrong man for her heart, but not what I would call an existential regret. That is, despite whatever she loses in this Faustian arrangement, she believes that she “made the right call.” In the end, this is hard for me to understand. In the very opening pages of the novel we hear her subsequent life described as,

“A clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.”

“Perhaps it was exemplary.” Does she believe that? Did Rouseeau’s Julie? Does anyone? Does anyone really want to live out their lives in a “transactional” business deal rather than a mutually satisfying romance? Listen to Fermina lament that which she has convinced herself of needing is actually all one really needs.

“She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young, in the Park of the Evangels. Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. In society she came to be the woman most loved, most catered to, and by the same token most feared, but in nothing was she more demanding or less forgiving than in the management of her house. She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.”

Was her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, capable of the kind of passion that Fermina might have wanted along with all the stability? She bet on a belief that the man could eventually become something he was not. Was this a mistake? It is only years after her husband dies (in his 70’s) that Fermina Daza begins to reconsider just what it is that human beings really need and do not need.

“However, when she thought he [Florentino] was completely erased from her memory, he reappeared where she least expected him, a phantom of her nostalgia. It was during the first glimmering of old age, when she began to feel that something irreparable had occurred in her life whenever she heard thunder before the rain."

This may well be the sound of Doc’s “lower self” in Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday incanting. “Lonely. Lonely.”

Was Dr. Urbino capable of the sort of irrational passion that Fermina’s heart, in spite of her father’s assertions to the contrary, needed? As it turns out, it appears that Dr. Urbino was capable of actually falling hopelessly in love. Just not with Fermina. Dr. Urbino had been raised by a mother who could see no reason for anyone to have passions. At one point Fermina had told her about a dream that she (Fermina) had had about a naked man running through the city spreading ashes, and her mother-in-law had told her that "a decent woman cannot have that kind of dream." Her son’s emotional and sensual life is never nurtured or developed we suspect, and it is not until later in his life that it comes out of the closet with a vengeance.

“Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.”

This may well be what Fermina finds so devastating about her husband’s affair with a black woman later in his life. For from that dalliance, she must have learned that she could have had both stability and passion. And if she had stuck with Florentino, she would have.

Gabriel Marquez’s novel asks many profound questions about love, marriage, and life. How does one know when they reject one person for another that they are doing the right thing? Maybe in the concluding paragraphs of the novel we get a clue. As Florentino and the widowed Fermina decide to spend the rest of their lives on a river boat together, they reflect on what they have – they have enough romance sufficient for their desires and enough stability sufficient for their needs. And that, it may well be, was always what any of us needs.

“Neither one could imagine being in any other home but the cabin, or eating in any other way but on the ship, or living any other life, for that would be alien to them forever. It was, indeed, like dying.”

Perhaps we know what we need by paying attention to all parts of ourselves. Perhaps we know when we have the love that we need when we realize that not having exactly that person in that life feels like dying.

Question for Comment: Have you ever felt like dying without someone? Have you ever gotten over it?