Despite the fact that I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude almost a week ago, I haven’t moved on to the next book. It feels like if I move on without some kind of closure ritual, I’ve been somehow unfaithful to the story, kind of like hooking up the weekend after you broke up with your girlfriend.

So let this brief reflection serve as a poor man’s closure on the novel. Let it serve not as a last thought, but as a stopping point, as future forays into Marquez’ Macondo short stories will surely resurrect the novel itself, as will plans to bring the book into my AP class.

I’ve been avoiding this discussion because it’s too much right now. Too much to go back into the book and examine all the different solitudes. Too much to think that the characters are representative of anything other than themselves. Too much to think of the ways I’ve experienced and observed solitude.

So can you define solitude as something as simple as mine-ness. If my sadness is a place to which I escape the minutiae of daily life, if playing around in the kitchen for this one, in the workshop for that one, is a way of getting some “me time,” then yes. I choose that part of my character most defines me, or most readily protects me from definement, and voila!, I have found solitude.

The physical places to which we escape are the most easily discernible forms of solitude. My basement forays to be sad by myself as a child – solitude. My friend’s sister’s hour-long periods of hair-washing and hair-drying after her parents’ death – solitude. My daughter disappearing under water in the tub or pool when she doesn’t feel like being bothered with instruction or rebuke – solitude. The hours you spend gaming, Lebron.

What is more interesting is our ability to create compartments within ourselves for the sake of solitude. Madame Defarge knitting, knitting dropping heads. Amaranta (and Penelope), weaving and unweaving, figuratively and literally. To keep potential lovers at bay; tapestry as impenetrable wall.

IN Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, he defended himself against the intrusion of the world, against relationships with others. There, he communed with the family had had left behind, his father existing through crystal shards as adviser, as oracle. We all have secrets; we all compartmentalize identities and allow some people to know us in one way, others in another.

It would be silly to boil the theme of solitude into a meaning. It is an opportunity to think different thoughts, to try on different lenses through which we might see ourselves and others. It is the place we go to in an enactment of our own journey motif, our Ithaka, I suppose. Sometimes we recharge, and sometimes we go to some more malevolent place, a place whose sole virtue is its inhospitability to anyone else, a place where we destroy ourselves from within.

Perhaps now I can get to Henderson the Rain King. And then, if luck holds, Gary Shteyngart’s new book will be available at the library.

In the meantime, I will try to discover why I can’t copy and paste from word into Blogger when I’m in Windows 7, which forces me to email the blog pieces written here to myself so I can open them up on the computer that runs Vista so I can post them on the blog.

If you have any suggestions about how to get Windwos 7 to do what I need it to do, Lebron, feel free to post them in the comments section. Maybe you can also tell me why Word 2010 doesn’t autocorrect Windwos to Windows. You think it doesn’t have Windows in its dictionary?

PS, Lebron. I did a little research and found out that I have to run blogger in compatibility mode. I'm like a freakin' internet detective, man.