Actions Speak Louder than Words
Today in class we discussed the short story, “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I read through this story at a fairly quick pace the first time because it says that it’s a tale for children so I assumed it would be considerably easy to understand. Needless to say, I was wrong! I read it through one more time and I thought it might have something to do with church and Christianity. We then discussed briefly in class how that could be part of the meaning.
It’s so easy to walk around telling people what we believe and telling them how we’re living our lives and how they should be living theirs. What everyone knows but actually fails to remember is that no one is perfect. In the story, the angel landed in the back yard of these so called Christians and they put him in a chicken coup and proceeded to sell tickets so people could see the angel. Their son was very ill and the angel was technically there to help the son because once the son was healthy and went off to school the angel left. Throughout the story the family capitalized on the angel’s presence. It never actually states that they were appreciative of him being there and helping the family get into a bigger and better house with screens so the child would stop getting ill from the crabs. It says later in the story that they were ready for the angel to leave because he was becoming annoying. It seems throughout the whole story the family was simply using the angel and was never actually grateful.
As humans we’re always attracted to things that we shouldn’t be doing. They look more appealing to us even though we know what the right thing to do is. We forget that we should be grateful for the things and people that help us through hard times.