Weird Analogies

"These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can’t live with them, can't live without them." - Aristophanes

The internet is not always the most reliable source of information, but I would like to think that Aristophanes really did say as much (most likely in his play Lysistrata). This quote is applicable to both our summer reading books especially The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Tereza and Sabina, two particularly complex women, transformed the lives of both Tomas and Franz. Tomas was always torn between loving Tereza and having sex with other women and it is only towards the end of the novel that he gives up his liaisons to live in peace with Tereza in the country; Franz could not physically keep Sabina in his life but he held on to her memory and imagined her watching him assert his newfound independence (bye, Marie-Claude). 

Regarding One Hundred Years of Solitude, I think of this quote in relation to the crazy patriarch José Arcadio Buendía (at least in the early stages of Macondo’s development). While Aristophanes’ quote is about women, in One Hundred Years of Solitude some men were daydreaming while women were getting stuff done :P José Arcadio Buendía founded Macondo with Ursula and took care of his people and the construction of the village in the beginning; Macondo would not exist without him. But when José Arcadio Buendía gradually started to go insane, Macondo gradually modernized (mostly for the worst). He was tied to a tree because his famiily couldn’t live with him but they couldn’t live without him. This analogy is really WEIRD and not entirely logical, but just go with it.