ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE POST 2

"Seduced by the simplicity of the formulas to double the quantity of gold, Jose Arcadio Buendia paid court to Ursula for several weeks to that she would let him dig up her colonial coins and increast ehm by as many times as it was possible to subdivide mercury. Ursula gave in, as always, to her husband's unyielding obstinacy. Then Jose ARcadio Buendia threw three doubloons into a pan and fused them with copper fillings, orpiment, brimstone, and lead. He put it all to boil in a pot of castor oil until he got a thick and pestilential syrup which was more like common caramel than valuaable gold. In risky and desperate processes of distillation, melted with the seven planetary metals, mixed with hermetic mercury and vitriol of Cyprus, and put back to cook in hog fat for lack of any radish oil, Ursula's precious inheritance was reduced to a large piece of burnt hog cracklings that was firmly stuck to the bottom of the pot."

This quote emphasizes the greed that the incorportation of technology into the society has introduced into Jose Arcadio Buendia's life. He hears about a way to "cut" persay, quanities of gold to make them larger, and begins to take selfish risks; he asks his wife to donate precious doubloons from her inheritance for him to employ a dicey experiment on. During this desperate attempt to satisfy his new-found desires for money and "things", he carelessly (much to his chagrin) obliterates the doubloons into a melted and burnt monstrosity of precious metal and more common substances. He has began to take advantage of his resources: his giving and submissive wife, and her fortune. This transition from being a hard-working founder of a small town to a greedy man destroying gold coins could be compared to a society that begins knocking down forrests with endangered wildlife to continue building homes to accomodate a larger population--technology is opening new doors to options that may be tempting, but morally deprecating.