Im just going to let the world know right now that I believe that I am developing a bit of a serious Cormac McCarthy fetish. My esteem for his work seems to be turning a dangerous corner towards serious stalker fiction writer Man-crush. My friend Erin turned me on to him a few years (and over a thousand pages) back and I havnt been the same Jex since. I have just exfoliated my mind grinding through the pages of yet another McCarthy Novel No Country For Old Men. A fun spa treatment for the mind treat that I want to recommend to everyone.
( Long Pause for census bureau guy at the door. Im now on the social grid )
Im not sure what it is in particular about his books that gets my goose every time. At first glance maybe it's the Baby scalping cowboys or Post-Apocalyptic cannibals eating newborns in his books. Perhaps its the blood that runs, gurgles and sprays all over the pages but I think that upon closer inspection getting past the grinding gore it becomes really those streaks of humanity, the human condition and man's search for meaning that fill his books in the most profound ways. He really just puts man/woman out there in the universe and after doing so has this pragmatic way of articulating a deep anxiety of the world that bellows loudly into many of the same dark places that we forget about or overlook. He lays it all out on the world like a card dealer skillfully dealing his last hand. In his book he has this loud and concise voice of god, Hemingway meets Faulkner meets old wise Grizzly Bear prose that I seem to always eat up smiling like cow tongues boiled in Whiskey. His style is a true testament to some of that old fashion real Amuurican pragmatism in writing that has at times left our literary scene. Im left wishing that Cormac McCarthy is somehow my long lost wise great uncle. A haggard wise and grey old man living in some impossibly desolate corner of the forgotten west spitting deep wisdom at me in between naps on a creaking old porch.
Anyhoo all praises aside, I Just wanted to share a few resonating sentences of his with yall. Hoping that if you havnt read any of his books that you consider picking one up.
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
— Cormac McCarthy
