"He has problems with his memory. Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him,"
I had just dropped out of the faculty of law after six semesters devoted almost entirely to reading whatever I could get my hands on, and reciting from memory the unrepeatable poetry of Spanish Golden Age. I already had read, in translation, and in borrowed editions, all the books I needed to learn the novelist's craft, and had published six stories in newspaper supplements, winning the enthusiasm of my friends and the attention of a few critics. The following month I would turn twenty three, I had passed the age of military service and was a veteran of two bouts of gonorrhea and everyday I smoked, with no foreboding, sixty cigarettes made from the most barbaric tobacco. I divided my leisure between Baranquilla and Cartagena de Indias, on Colombia's coast, living like a king on what I was paid for my daily commentaries in the newspaper El Heraldo, which amounted to almost less than nothing, and sleeping in the best company possible wherever I happened to be at night. As if the uncertainty of my aspirations and the chaos of my life were not enough, a group of inseparable friends and I were preparing to publish without funds a bold magazine that Alfanso Fuenmayor had been planning for the past three years. What more could anyone desire?
--From Garcia Marquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale.
I had just dropped out of the faculty of law after six semesters devoted almost entirely to reading whatever I could get my hands on, and reciting from memory the unrepeatable poetry of Spanish Golden Age. I already had read, in translation, and in borrowed editions, all the books I needed to learn the novelist's craft, and had published six stories in newspaper supplements, winning the enthusiasm of my friends and the attention of a few critics. The following month I would turn twenty three, I had passed the age of military service and was a veteran of two bouts of gonorrhea and everyday I smoked, with no foreboding, sixty cigarettes made from the most barbaric tobacco. I divided my leisure between Baranquilla and Cartagena de Indias, on Colombia's coast, living like a king on what I was paid for my daily commentaries in the newspaper El Heraldo, which amounted to almost less than nothing, and sleeping in the best company possible wherever I happened to be at night. As if the uncertainty of my aspirations and the chaos of my life were not enough, a group of inseparable friends and I were preparing to publish without funds a bold magazine that Alfanso Fuenmayor had been planning for the past three years. What more could anyone desire?
--From Garcia Marquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale.
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