“It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.” (Marquez, paragraph 6-7)
This quote is from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Prize Lecture entitled “The solitude of Latin America”. In short Marquez is saying that they are trying to measure them in the same way they measure themselves and their accomplishments today not remembering how long it took them to build up their own empires and how those empires had plenty of downfalls of their own. This quote is a metaphor depicting someone measuring themselves with a yardstick and measuring someone else with the same yardstick. Marquez compares this to people judging other people’s lives based on their own experiences. He also makes the point that their “quest for identity” (most likely the Latin American Identity) was just as hard as building London or Rome, so those people cannot say they worked any harder or fared any better. How the Swiss “Bloodied Europe” leaves them no more...