Cormac McCarthy at his best reminds us of this terrifying truth: there is a human soul. Beneath the stark style and the terrifying images, the ill-fated cowboys, and all the eponymous pretty horses, McCarthy’s works challenge our material sensibilities and demand we stare deeply into the empty skull of the world; the truths, half-truths, and lies of this place we occupy. There may be few more difficult or violent writers in the western canon but there are fewer still who capture the beauty and the hope that remain among “the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather.”
Pulling from the pantheon of world literature, the stories that have remained indelible on the human heart, McCarthy describes the degenerates, the murderers, the psychopaths and killers, the forgotten and the unnamed, the common and the profane, and he describes all these with the kinds of beautiful words reserved for heroes and for the men of myths and legends. It is difficult to think of a writer who has described violence and horror with more exquisite, breath-taking prose.
McCarthy’s characters often have a fatal flaw of kindness. Take for example Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, who would be two million dollars richer except for his decision to return to the place of danger and give a dying man a drink of water. Or think of The Kid in Blood Meridian whose struggle with the hideous and unforgettable Judge comes down to whether or not the powerful can be gracious, or only devouring. All the Pretty Horses contains one of the most poignant of these characters in John Grady Cole, whose hellish odyssey begins through an absolutely unnecessary act of generosity. All these protagonists are admirable, damned by their own virtue in a world that has no use for the merciful.
Why read such a bleak observer? How does this fit with Paul’s charge to the Phillipians to dwell on whatever is true and honorable and pure, what is lovely, commendable and excellent?
McCarthy is a keen observer. Before his death last month he was a board trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, a prestigious enclave of physicists, mathematicians, and polymath geniuses. His love for SFI stemmed in large part in being around brilliant thinkers, constant in their search for scientific truth and accuracy and he could discuss as eloquently and knowledgeably on Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, and Einstein as he could on Homer, Faulkner, Melville, or Hemingway. In that intersection lies the particular sanctity of McCarthy.
No writer has so clearly seen into the infinite complexity of time and space and yet not lost their unending curiosity about the confounding paradoxes of human nature. Nor has any writer tied together the two divided dimensions of science and art so compellingly. To read McCarthy is to see human nature and the universe uncovered as they truly are and yet imagined as they never again will be. It is to come face-to-face with humanity at its most vile, nature at its most cruel, the soul at its most enduring, and the hero in his darkest valley and his greatest triumph. Perhaps McCarthy himself put it best in the words of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell from No Country:
“I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job – not to be glorious. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore. More than that, I don’t want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part of this world”
Take what you will from McCarthy but these are the things I meditate on when I finish one of his works. Man everywhere is a craven and unkind beast living in a world beautiful and cruel and lovely and lethal. And this common man, this unintelligible man, is full of cowardice and courage, of kindness and catastrophe, and hatred and hospitality. This man has survived for years because he is able to kill but he has lived because he hasn’t. All the same the man who kills will live and the man who will refuse to kill will die. And then I think of what Christ says about such things.
This may be the most important reason to read McCarthy. He will wake you from your unimaginative stupor and frighten you with the reality of the world, a reality we too easily forget in our progressive comfort and our electric ease. The enlightenment separated the world into the natural and the supernatural, the real and tangible set against the unseen and the believed. Such division does not exist in McCarthy’s world and neither should it in ours.
In the second installment of the border trilogy, Billy Parham examines a dead wolf. There’s a lot that could be said here but for fear of spoiling an excellent story I’ll say no more than that and encourage you to find it and read it for yourself. I’ll simply quote the portion I find most interesting in this scene. McCarthy writes:
“He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.“
What we believe, what we think, what we imagine in the stories we tell, shapes and transforms the world just as much as the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. The history of the earth is as molded by the stories of Homer and of Shakespeare as they are by the indomitable forces of nature. Reading McCarthy we must see this brave, beautiful, gorgeous and devouring world and we must see, too, the sinful, broken, hungry men who day by day make some meaning out of the seemingly untranslatable language of ordinary time and space under the eye of a God one day to return.
