Cormac McCarthy and Great Prose

The Road

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” – Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Considering the subject matter of the book, this particular passage leaves me with a serious sense of sadness and foreboding. The first half is tactile and present, while the second half speaks of loss and absence.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” – Cormac McCarthy, The Road

A soul crushing passage that opts to capture a sense of feeling and emotion rather than simply trying to explain it outright, and then -in my opinion- achieves the latter anyway.

All the Pretty Horses

“He stood at the window of the empty café and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.” – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I feel like this quote does an excellent job of conveying the tone of the book and the views of the character in question. They don’t necessarily relate the world as it is, but as the author wishes you to see it. That most people have felt this way for a short time at one point or another only reinforces it’s effect.

Blood Meridian

“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, Blood Meridian

I am such a sucker for the dizzying effect the scope of life and the universe can have on us when we take the time to sit down and consider it. Doubly so, when it’s done in such an interesting and concise way. Heavy shades of Lovecraft and cosmic horror here while never once implying anything of the like.