Footsteps

Today, I received this email from a Colombian friend who used to live in Canada with his family and then recently decided to go back to Colombia. The story of immigration is an “interesting” one:

Hello my good friends,

I think all of you knew about our plans to come to Colombia for a year.

Well, ... after several days of traveling, we are finally at our final destination i.e. Popayan (Cauca, Colombia) a beautiful old city in the Colombian Andes. M. and D. are planning to stay for a year and I will stay for six months.

I see people on the street and no one looks strange to me, I see working poor people and pretentious rich ones. I see people from the army, farmers and revolutionary ones, and all talk in a language that I understand. I do not necessarily share their political views but I do understand their personal wishes - No one is a strange when we look at their wishes.

In other words, I am very happy to be here and I wish you all are having a great summer. Do not worry much about the forest fires or the black out in New York. People here have more complicated problems and however, live a simple life, one day at the time.

A big hug,

D. and the family.

“He would have been sixty-four years old last July and he was a perfect Leo: tenacious, firm in his decisions, and unpredictable. “What Allende thinks only Allende knows,” one of his cabinet ministers had told me. He loved life, he loved flowers, he loved dogs and he was a gallant with a touch of the old school about him, perfumed notes and furtive rendezvous. His greatest virtue was following through, but fate could grant him only that rare and tragic greatness of dying in armed defense of the anachronistic booby of bourgeois law, defending a Supreme Court of Justice which had repudiated him but would legitimize his murderers, defending a miserable Congress which had declared him illegitimate but which was to bend complacently before the will of usurpers, defending the freedom of opposition parties which had sold their souls to fascism, defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system which he had proposed abolishing, but without a shot being fired. The drama took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives forever.”
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, “The Death of Salvador Allende”, translated to English by Gregory Rabassa, published in Sociology of Developing Societies, pp.350-360.

In Insomnia (Christopher Nolan, 2002), a movie that might not be considered so great with standard measures, I came across once again with one of my favorite themes: a workaholic detective with no clear past, no human connections and no clear purpose in life who only concerns with solving that immediate puzzle before him. Yet as is the case in many similar movies, at the end, the problem sheds some light on his understanding of life. With the beauty of the northern sky casting in the background and the detective suffering from chronic insomnia, the movie delivers that mixture of feelings which is so common and natural in real life. It seems from Sherlock Holmes to this movie, the character of a lonely and stubborn detective can lure us again and again. I can think of another TV drama, ER, which also portraits the same type of characters in a context different than mystery genre.