Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
That is the opening sentence of Garbriel Garcia Marquez’s remarkable novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. I bring this up having read Roger Ebert’s post (from last Monday), Perform a concert in words. It’s a great, if lengthy, read about wonderful writing and how the use of words can be magical. It prompted me to hunt down some of my own favourite passages from books.
The Marquez sentence above is one of those and primarily for the use of a single word, discover. Marquez could have written something like, “… when his father took him to see ice for the first time.” By using the word “discover” he doesn’t just say the same thing in a more efficient way, he communicates a completely different sense.
For me, the word discover, at least in this context, doesn’t just mean coming upon something for the first time. There is an implicit sense of wonder as well. That may not be in the dictionary definition of the word, but used in this way, with many of the surrounding words (like “father” and “ice”), it suggests childhood and marvel. And for me, someone who was raised and continues to live in Canada, the word is astonishing because it’s related to ice.
How do you discover ice?
Well, anything seen for the first time is “discovered.” But having been surrounded by snow and ice every winter throughout my life, they are assumptions I live with. I don’t ever think of them as being encountered “for the first time.”
Last winter, though, I remembered that sentence when my dog, Molly, experienced her first Canadian winter and “discovered” snow. I realized how exact Marquez’s use of the word was, how right it was.
Mark Twain wasn’t just trying to be amusing when he said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.”
Words matter. Finding the right one isn’t always easy but, when you do, eyes open. Common things are seen for the first time.
They are discovered.
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