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RIP Cormac McCarthy


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“I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

Couldn’t agree more with this. It would take a level of repression that would beg the question of is the cure worse than the disease?

More likely the people who aspire to such beliefs are taken advantage of by those of us who do not harbor such notions. 

Which is why it’s so important not to possess those illusions. 

That said, it’s also true humanity can be remarkably generous with one another, and that’s rarely a prominent feature in the McCarthy books I’ve read. 

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6 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

More likely the people who aspire to such beliefs are taken advantage of by those of us who do not harbor such notions. 

Which is why it’s so important not to possess those illusions. 

That said, it’s also true humanity can be remarkably generous with one another, and that’s rarely a prominent feature in the McCarthy books I’ve read. 

I’ll open this response with the admission that I’ve never read any McCarthy. HOWEVER, as a human being living in the current times, I will say it sounds like he was not super helpful with his literature.  We need less gratuitous violence, not more.  Humans are fucked up enough already. 
 

I just experienced a month on trail and can definitively say that humanity can be remarkably generous. We should celebrate those that accentuate that attribute, not the opposite. 
 

Can’t wait to be destroyed by the fan boys in this thread. 

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8 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

“I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

Couldn’t agree more with this. It would take a level of repression that would beg the question of is the cure worse than the disease?

More likely the people who aspire to such beliefs are taken advantage of by those of us who do not harbor such notions. 

Which is why it’s so important not to possess those illusions. 

That said, it’s also true humanity can be remarkably generous with one another, and that’s rarely a prominent feature in the McCarthy books I’ve read. 

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."

The two authors who I think have had the deepest influence on my life and thinking are McCarthy and CS Lewis.  Lewis helped me to understand good, and I never really grasped evil until I read McCarthy.

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12 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

Glad he was able to put out those last 2 before he died.

Probably a lot of folks around here's favorite author or at least top 3.

Certainly one of mine, probably my favorite (until now) living author.  I loved No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, The Road & Blood Meridian most of all.  I read The Road in the year after my father died, and the ending hit me fucking hard.  I wept like a baby.

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10 minutes ago, Damor said:

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."

The two authors who I think have had the deepest influence on my life and thinking are McCarthy and CS Lewis.  Lewis helped me to understand good, and I never really grasped evil until I read McCarthy.

I don’t think we can actually understand evil from a book, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

My thing is, we’re not on some kind of arc as a species where we get more loving and more generous with each generation, but there are people under the illusion that’s the case. I find that extremely dangerous, which is why I pulled the quote and commented on it. 

Over the last 70,000 years or so our species goes in various kinds of pendulums. Especially since the advent of agriculture, but even before then.

No one measures past civilizations based upon how kind they were, and how happy their citizens were. And of those that were remarkable at instituting a level of equality, communal generosity, and individual freedom, they were invariably destroyed by more powerful civilizations built upon heirarchy, repression, and military prowess.

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8 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

No one measures past civilizations based upon how kind they were, and how happy their citizens were. And of those that were remarkable at instituting a level of equality, communal generosity, and individual freedom, they were invariably destroyed by more powerful civilizations built upon heirarchy, repression, and military prowess.

I feel like you make my point. If out mindset weren’t so predicated on these things, couldn’t we prevent the whole scale violence?  I mean, maybe not. Maybe I’m naive. But I don’t think glorifying it helps. 

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Blood Meridian is the great American novel.  A book about violence, racism, and the beauty of the American West. It was the last book I read before my kind shaky vision pushed me to audio books. I’ve read it twice and already hungry to go again. 
 

And that was only one of multiple books he wrote that are amongst the greatest books in the 20th century canon. 

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16 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

My thing is, we’re not on some kind of arc as a species where we get more loving and more generous with each generation, but there are people under the illusion that’s the case. I find that extremely dangerous, which is why I pulled the quote and commented on it. 

Are you talking about our DNA and instincts that are ingrained in us? Because society has absolutely become more loving and generous. 

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59 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I’ll open this response with the admission that I’ve never read any McCarthy. HOWEVER, as a human being living in the current times, I will say it sounds like he was not super helpful with his literature.  We need less gratuitous violence, not more.  Humans are fucked up enough already. 
 

I just experienced a month on trail and can definitively say that humanity can be remarkably generous. We should celebrate those that accentuate that attribute, not the opposite. 
 

Can’t wait to be destroyed by the fan boys in this thread. 

It would be a shame if you were attacked in too brutal a fashion. 

In every other species a broken leg is a death sentence. Mankind is the only species capable of nursing someone so fundamentally crippled back to health, and also has the willingness to do so. 

There are innumerable fossil records of people given more elaborate burials than their peers who possessed some kind of infirmity. A woman who couldn’t chew and so it’s obvioua someone cared for her by chewing her food for her. People with dwarfism obviously celebrated in some way. 

We are tribal. If we associate someone else in some way as part of our tribe, we can be remarkably generous with one another. Even the most ruthless societies exhibit this. But an inherent defining aspect of being part of a tribe is having some kind of identifiable group that’s not part of that tribe. I don’t believe violence is  inevitable...but it’s very close. Someone at some point demonizes the other tribe, often as part of a bid for power, and then our natural inclination is to go down a path of repression, deportation, and extermination. 

An overall outlook that emphasizes the good in everyone can lead to a mending of fences. But it can also lead to a tribe adding their culture to the fossil record, rather than being extant. 

Having said all that, I feel an emphasis on either view loses an important aspect of our humanity. Personally I am grateful we had someone within my lifetime who wrote so eloquently about something I consider essential to us as human beings. At the same time, I’m glad we have the capacity as a species for other expressions as well. 

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48 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

I don’t think we can actually understand evil from a book, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

My thing is, we’re not on some kind of arc as a species where we get more loving and more generous with each generation, but there are people under the illusion that’s the case. I find that extremely dangerous, which is why I pulled the quote and commented on it. 

Over the last 70,000 years or so our species goes in various kinds of pendulums. Especially since the advent of agriculture, but even before then.

No one measures past civilizations based upon how kind they were, and how happy their citizens were. And of those that were remarkable at instituting a level of equality, communal generosity, and individual freedom, they were invariably destroyed by more powerful civilizations built upon heirarchy, repression, and military prowess.

You're not wrong.  But you're not entirely right (and I say that as one of this forum's premier pessimists).  The fascinating thing -- and McCarthy didn't whitewash it (to the extreme) -- is that humanity genuinely holds those dueling natures within itself, simultaneously.  It's not just cognitive dissonance, it's the dissonance of our essence; all at once, we are nurturers and murderers.  Is there a larger point to be made about balance?  Or is the larger point that there's no point at all (and I understand that The Passenger and Stella Maris make some of that point - I really want to read them both)?

I don't know that McCarthy's insights are world-changing, or even right.  But I damn well know that his way of crafting them was otherworldly.  One of the greatest craftsmen I've ever seen.

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57 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I will say it sounds like he was not super helpful with his literature.  We need less gratuitous violence, not more.  Humans are fucked up enough already. 

Is a large part of an artist’s legacy whether their art can be considered “helpful”? What does helpful art look like?

I’d argue that the kind of person that picks up and gets through a McCarthy novel is a relatively thoughtful person that gets a lot out of his unique depictions of violence and morality, whether it aligns with their worldview or not.

Your are editorializing calling it “gratuitous”, especially never having read anything he wrote. I totally get it if you personally don’t like art that focuses on the themes that his books focus on, but to assume they must be a net negative to society at large because you don’t get anything out of it seems pretty reductive.

 

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The little boy in The Road. His character stays with me though I've only read the novel once all those years ago when it first came out. "Unrelentingly bleek" is how I recall describing the book, but the little boy's pureness and his innocent understanding of right and wrong worked magic on me the way it did his father in the book. It gave me hope about humanity, even in the face of the brutality required to stay alive in the book's world. It still echos in my mind after all these years.

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37 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I feel like you make my point. If out mindset weren’t so predicated on these things, couldn’t we prevent the whole scale violence?  I mean, maybe not. Maybe I’m naive. But I don’t think glorifying it helps. 

Boy, I never found McCarthy glorified violence. He made it seem horrifying. 

I still feel like you have a valid point. I just don’t know if MCarthy is the one I would make as Exhibit A. 

I never wanted to be one of MCarthy’s villains. They weren’t really sympathetic characters to me. To me he illustrated them as elemental forces. They are not to be celebrated. They are to be feared. 

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1 hour ago, NorthLoop said:

Glad he was able to put out those last 2 before he died.

Probably a lot of folks around here's favorite author or at least top 3.

def mine...i was introduced via Blood Meridian in a writing component class at UT in the 90s, had my mind blown, and proceeded to devour everything else i could find...up to Stella Maris which i literally just started reading last weekend. wow. he was a great one. 

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1 hour ago, UncleSonny said:

Is a large part of an artist’s legacy whether their art can be considered “helpful”? What does helpful art look like?

I’d argue that the kind of person that picks up and gets through a McCarthy novel is a relatively thoughtful person that gets a lot out of his unique depictions of violence and morality, whether it aligns with their worldview or not.

Your are editorializing calling it “gratuitous”, especially never having read anything he wrote. I totally get it if you personally don’t like art that focuses on the themes that his books focus on, but to assume they must be a net negative to society at large because you don’t get anything out of it seems pretty reductive.

 

Extraordinarily well put.  

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18 minutes ago, burntorangebongos said:

The little boy in The Road. His character stays with me though I've only read the novel once all those years ago when it first came out. "Unrelentingly bleek" is how I recall describing the book, but the little boy's pureness and his innocent understanding of right and wrong worked magic on me the way it did his father in the book. It gave me hope about humanity, even in the face of the brutality required to stay alive in the book's world. It still echos in my mind after all these years.

wonderfully put.

years ago i read A Thousand Splendid Suns then went straight into The Road... when i finished i felt like i'd been emotionally abused and i literally cried for three days. i mean, i may have been PMSing, but still...

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I read Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men.  My challenge in reading Blood Meridian wasn't the violence, but instead what I would call the 'thickness' of it.  Very dense, many words I could not find in a dictionary and the whole punctuation thing.  It was obviously great, but it was a challenging read and I was releived when I was finished with it.   He wouldn't make my personal list of favorite authors.  But I recognize his greatness and his skilll.   RIP.

 

 

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This weekend I grabbed The Road off of the bookshelf. I had been putting off reading that book again because it hit me so hard the first time I read it in 2006. It's his only book which I haven't read at least twice. I guess I need to start reading it again.

RIP Mr McCarthy. Your words guide me like no other author has or will.

The sentence below has shaped my temperance to life's events like no other sentence in any book.

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

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Shame as he’s one of the greatest American writers ever. In the middle of the border trilogy while on paternity leave, and the way he can describe the relationship between man and nature is second to none. 
 

Edit: this line really stuck with me from the tail end of All The Pretty Horses:

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

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Whenever I think of Blood Meridian, I always remember the following passage sentence.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

 

 

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3 hours ago, C-Man said:

My first exposure to him was in Dr Graham's Texas Literature class at UT. We read "All the Pretty Horses."

McCarthy was a giant.

Same.  I still have my copy along with Bud Shrake's Strange Peaches. 

 

What a loss.

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1 hour ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

I read Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men.  My challenge in reading Blood Meridian wasn't the violence, but instead what I would call the 'thickness' of it.  Very dense, many words I could not find in a dictionary and the whole punctuation thing.  It was obviously great, but it was a challenging read and I was releived when I was finished with it.   He wouldn't make my personal list of favorite authors.  But I recognize his greatness and his skilll.   RIP.

 

 

i totally get what you're saying here, i feel the same...and that's also how i feel about my other favorites, James Ellroy and Margaret Atwood. and the best TV show ever, Deadwood. and Paul Thomas Anderson films lol. 

i might describe it as...they take extraordinary effort. i find it engaging but maybe also rewarding? the effort makes it stick with me more, for sure. 

to be fair, my favorites also include Stephen King and Seinfeld 😁

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Cormac published his first work of nonfiction in 2016. It is an interesting piece:

https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
 

Quote

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” 

 

 

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