Reflections on Greatness
One thing people mean when they call something “great” is that it may not be nice. That great and nice don’t get along well together is the point of a scene toward the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Long after the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, soldiers of the Conservative regime come searching for his grandson, who is the last surviving witness of the banana worker massacre committed by that same regime. As they are leaving, one soldier politely asks if he can take as a souvenir one of the little golden fish...
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