Cormac McCarthy's personal library

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/two-years-cormac-mccarthys-death-rare-access-to-personal-library-reveals-man-behind-myth-180987150/

by bigflern • 10 months ago

286 136 10 months ago

smithsonianmag.com

lomase2• 10 months ago

The Road is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.

I could not stop reading it, but at the same time I hated how it made me feel. I stoped reading novels for years after finishing it.

octygen• 10 months ago

The Road is my favorite fathering book ever. I have recommended it to all my dad friends. Audiobook is excellent too.

thombles• 10 months ago

I gifted it to a couple of new Dad friends. They never did get back to me about it. Fair.

ycombinete3• 10 months ago

I can see why, but as a new father the last thing I want my fatherhood associated with is that horrible horrible story.

elephant812• 10 months ago

I've read it twice. Once as a naive 16-year-old. Once, as a young father. Profoundly upsetting the second time.

Cruncharoo• 10 months ago

I'd also suggest Siddhartha for this. Having read it at different points of my life makes it uniquely special.

virgil_disgr4ce• 10 months ago

I read The Road long before I became a father and part of me is, I guess, afraid to read it again now that I have two kids—perhaps because I remember how devastating it was then and suspecting it would be 100x that now. But I do intend to reread it sooner or later.

dzuc• 10 months ago

The only book I've ever read in a single sitting.

groos• 10 months ago

After reading the Road, I started on Blood Meridian and could not continue, swearing never to read McCarthy again. The man's soul was just too dark.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA4• 10 months ago

It’s the only book I’ve read where I came upon a passage that literally caused my jaw to drop.

blast3• 10 months ago

Do you remember which one?

johnnienaked3• 10 months ago

hated how it made me feel

I sometimes don't like feeling either.

JKCalhoun5• 10 months ago

"McCarthy’s detractors, meanwhile, found his writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly."

Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something.

I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker for the same reason.

wahnfrieden2• 10 months ago

Depiction isn’t endorsement

tolerance• 10 months ago

My impression is that Tarantino and McCarthy author with different motives in mind.

justupvoting7• 10 months ago

I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.

The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting.

Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't seem to care for that approach.

I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd suggest you give him another go.

I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly optimistic book.

As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)

BrenBarn4• 10 months ago

I think it's a stretch to call The Road optimistic.

JKCalhoun5• 10 months ago

FWIW, I've seen every one of Tarantino's films since "Reservoir Dogs".

I may give "The Road" a chance though.

dyauspitr3• 10 months ago

How is overly masculine a bad thing? Makes me want to read it even more.

lomase2• 10 months ago

Just read it and you will find out. Is a really short book.

komali2• 10 months ago

It could be clownish and a caricature. I enjoyed The Road but it makes me think of a critique of sci fi I read once, wherein masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones. Some books tackled this by demonstrating the presumptive and flawed approach sci fi writers take to biospheres / space stations / generation ships for example (Voyage from Yesteryear, A Half Built Garden) where despite all the engineering, the biosphere suffers. I suppose a part of why Dune made such waves was that it took a very human and ecological perspective front and center.

The Road could be seen as overly masculine in its portrayal of a man and his son against nearly the entire world, which is often the fantasy of male prepper types. Some oppositional takes to this would be e.g. Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red Death, where he presents the dichotomy directly in a post-apocalypse world and argues for the more optimistic outcome, wherein people work together in a non-exclusionary way to overcome whatever the apocalyptic scenario is, which might be considered a more feminine perspective. Others taking that perspective would include Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell."

In the Too Like Lightning series, Ada Palmer takes on the male/feminine sci fi angle directly by creating a near-utopian society of mostly gender neutral people. At one point in the novel a character argues that in fact they've created a feminine society of women, and therefore aren't prepared to handle the outlier class of people that want to create war, who have for the most part began to present explicitly as men.

lanfeust63• 10 months ago

No kidding. Try to find an "overly masculine" book among Pulizer or Hugo nominees today. And people feign to wonder where the male readers have gone.

jonahx• 10 months ago

You don't have to love them, but dismissing two of the 20th century's great artists in their respective mediums while having a blog named "engineersneedart" is certainly ironic.

JKCalhoun5• 10 months ago

I don’t see the irony or any conflict. I just don’t celebrate the worst in humanity and have no desire to see it in art either. Perhaps I think the world is dark enough and that the better art inspires and can lift us.

I don’t “love” either artist to be sure. Is that also dismissive? I’m not sure.

lunatuna• 10 months ago

I’ve only read The Road and found it extremely difficult because of the nihilism. I put it down in the middle of it and stewed for 6 months before I picked it up again. I am so glad I did. I think his detractors are right, it is violent, nihilistic, masculine and whatever else. Through that the other side of the contrast becomes so vivid. Maybe there are better ways to get there. For me it hit.

My daughter and I talk about the message in the book regularly. Though she has yet to read it. I see more clearly my purpose as a dad and as a member in my community. Totally worth the read.

tehnub• 10 months ago

It sounds like the book itself isn't nihilistic but there may be nihilistic characters in it, which doesn't seem like something worth criticizing it over.

philipallstar• 10 months ago

I think his detractors are right, it is violent, nihilistic, masculine and whatever else.

Thinking masculine is a criticism is quite a tell.

mirabilis2• 10 months ago

Haven’t read “The Road” yet, but I was able to take the time to read “Blood Meridian” this year— I don’t think I would describe the violence depicted as “relished.” It came across as vivid in an arduous, can’t-look-away-from-the-wreckage-so-bear-witness way, and I was really intrigued by how the Kid’s POV dissolves during the worst of it. And about “why someone might write about the worst among us”—the glory-seeking and hypocrisy of the Glanton gang also felt timely, to be frank. So, to me, it felt more like a clinical exposure of ugly rot rather than a luridly violent power fantasy like Inglorious Basterds.

Though I do kinda feel the “masculine” note in that quote haha, if only because the women that appeared in the story were steadfastly hospitable (or victims.) Disregarding any incident where the Judge was involved, it actually felt quaint, especially in contrast to everything else going on.

I’ll be interested as I check out the rest of his catalogue as to if the stomach-churning detail involved still feels necessary, or if my tolerance starts to change.

nylonstrung4• 10 months ago

Yeah it's hard to say he's "relishing" violence when he a very well-researched depiction of complete horrific and genocidal chapter of the Manifest Destiny period that was essentially forgotten.

I see the violence as a refutation of the idealized, sanitized version of the West popularized in mainstream Westerns. Where law and authority = good, even though the Glanton gang was funded and armed by US authorities

justupvoting7• 10 months ago

I think McCarthy is one of the greatest American writers, but I will say my two main gripes with him are his tendency to drift over the line into overwrought (sometimes the biblical language is incredibly powerful, sometimes not), and his utter inability to write women.

He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care about reality"? Hmm, ok?

"His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.

But no writer is flawless.

rgrieselhuber• 10 months ago

I've always gotten the sense from McCarthy that he was keenly aware that civilization is not just something to take for granted and that there is always something dangerous at the edges that needs to be carefully guarded against.

sharkweek• 10 months ago

100%

His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and we’re hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.

Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.

internet_points• 10 months ago

He said that things would get better.
The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.
But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so.

username2232• 10 months ago

"Child of God?" You started at just about the darkest, least approachable place. Try "No Country for Old Men" or "All the Pretty Horses," both of which are far easier to read and contemplate.

brennanpeterson• 10 months ago

Or The Crossing, which, at least for the first third is his sparest and best writing. At least, I prefer the marriage of the gothic sensibility and poetry with the classic western.

nylonstrung4• 10 months ago

All the Pretty Horses has much of the bleakness that characterizes his stories but also genuinely beauty and romanticism that he pulls off equally well

Love it

phendrenad2• 10 months ago

I have a theory that everyone has a different level of detachment vs self-insertion when consuming a fictional narrative. Those more self-insertive probably shouldn't read his books.

wahnfrieden2• 10 months ago

It's a media literacy issue. It's good to read challenging works to grow your understanding. I think the self-insertive tendency comes from consuming works oriented toward it with typical hero/villain structures

lubesGordi• 10 months ago

I think its just a simple matter of aesthetics. Some people find violence ugly, and don't like looking at it. Some people think that by looking at it you're somehow coming to a greater understanding of the world or something. Maybe that is the case for some super sheltered individuals, but I doubt it's the case on the whole.

If anyone has any ideas on what the point of violence in art is, I'm open to hearing it. Obviously horror is a genre and so is gore, and people seem to enjoy being shocked. I don't think that is what McCarthy was going for though. And he wasn't going for the vengeance-catharsis angle like Tarantino either.

crabkin• 10 months ago

Don't really think so. I love Pynchon and there's not really a character I'm latching onto when I read that. McCarthy and Pynchon both fetishize a sort of violence. I find McCarthy's writing going there many times for shock value or aesthetic reasons and it makes me take him less seriously. Other people have mentioned Tarantino and I think that is apt.

currymj2• 10 months ago

If you read his last two novels he was clearly well-informed about mathematics.

However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here, I think the reporter may be a little too credulous about that. I suspect he had the very common experience of buying a yellow book and being defeated in the first couple chapters.

scarmig3• 10 months ago

That might be an understatement of his capabilities, though obviously he wasn't a professional mathematician. It's a joy to read some of the eulogies professors at the Santa Fe Institute gave to him:

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/memoriam-cormac-mcc...

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and a memory to match. Topics ranged from salvage diving — something we discussed a few days ago — to far more academic fare often focused on mathematics and physics.
Cormac and I engaged on a wide range of topics. Some recurring themes included social mobility, machine intelligence, the intersection of genius and madness, and cars and trucks.
Cormac also often remarked that a lively conversation with friends is about as good as sex. He’d talk for hours about physics, math, novels, philosophy, human nature, bawdy humor, corny humor, architecture (including detailed advice on my own house), gambling, history, and any question that lacked a quick and obvious answer.

Etc.

cols• 10 months ago

Thanks very much for posting this link. The eulogies were indeed a pleasure to read. Choked up a few times.

noosphr2• 10 months ago

His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments,

I'm not saying that he did, but this along with being the right age to have read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler strongly suggest that he used that book to grasp a lot more of his books than most people can.

That book gives you a very good strategy for reading books that are beyond you normally. In the three years since I've read it I've managed to finish books that I couldn't read even when I was doing my PhD and it was my full time job to understand them.

The funny thing is that I only ran into that book when I was trying to figure out how to build knowledge graphs for complex documents using LLMs. Using multiple readings to create a summary of each chunk, then a graph of the connections between the chunks, then a glossary of all the terms and finally a critique of each chunk gave better than sota results for the documents I was working on.

chompychop• 10 months ago

Where can I read more about your research? Knowledge graphs interest me.

posterguy• 10 months ago

I'm curious why you think that "strongly suggests" anything?

voidhorse• 10 months ago

However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here

Why? And what exactly would mastery look like? Regardless, McCarthy didn't make his mark as a mathematician so his private ability to understand doesn't matter. Why take the opportunity to make a negative assumption and diminish the possibility that he had mastered an understanding in his private life? What does this accomplish? Seems like the only thing it could possibly do is to try and make you and me feel better about our own inadequacies, without proof.

currymj2• 10 months ago

I don't think it diminishes him.

"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.

However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.

While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.

ChanningAllen• 10 months ago

This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.

I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA4• 10 months ago

I think that’s an allusion to the Gnostic demiurge.

metadat• 10 months ago

For the uninitiated (like me!):

TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god". E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."

In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans. Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to return to the true, good God.

ixaxaar• 10 months ago

Or maybe he was searching for "structure", the way Grothendieck was - in pure math, in systems biology, in complex networks (e.g. civilizations, culture, occult) and in individual behaviors

layman51• 10 months ago

I hope that wasn't Cormac McCarthy's stand-in because the Judge character is like some type of supernatural violent being.

aloha2436• 10 months ago

It doesn't have to be a direct stand-in. It's mentioned in the article that people suspect McCarthy of reveling in the violence in his novels. Whether he does or does not he would certainly have been aware of that perception. Judge Holden as a character embodies many distasteful qualities of mankind, it would make sense that the qualities he embodies the most distinctly are the ones McCarthy sees in himself.

nylonstrung4• 10 months ago

The only "self-insert" he's done is the main character of Suttree which is semi-autobiographical

The judge is an incarnation of evil and a pedophile so I don't think that's his Mary sue

BrenBarn4• 10 months ago

Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45383439

ndneighbor• 10 months ago

Slight tangent brought up by the article, but usually the greats aren't good at just one thing but have a combination of eccentricities that form the person. I find it heartening that Cormac had these in spades.

elcapitan• 10 months ago

Great article. Reading it, I was expecting the author to come across a little sled labeled "Rosebud" every next sentence.

gandalfstoe• 10 months ago

Eek, accumulating, curating, memorializing misses the point he made.

lanfeust63• 10 months ago

the point

Just the one?

dcchambers• 10 months ago

Incredible article. Thanks for sharing.

wewxjfq• 10 months ago

They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.

idoubtit• 10 months ago

Among the famous writers that I know through their writings, I'd expect Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco to have read many thousands of books, because that wide culture was a major element of their fictions. The later did have 50,000 books at home, but the former became blind and probably didn't own many books.

With simple math, reading 2 books each week leads to at most 7,000 over a lifetime. If Denny McCarthy's guess is right (read 85% of 20k), his older brother read about 4 to 5 books a week, every week, from teenager to his old age.

Barrin92• 10 months ago

Funny that you bring up Borges and Eco. Eco when commenting on his library, I can't remember if in an essay or lecture, referred to it as an 'anti-library', pointing out that one of the most important skills a reader can possess is to be able to talk about books one hasn't read. As in Borges Library of Babel most people will be doomed to only read very little of what is in existence.

He thought his huge library should be taken as a research tool and sign of 'conscious ignorance' of the vast things you don't know, rather than taking a consumer mindset to it, which you see a lot of people do when they brag about how many books they've read.

athpythoncoder• 10 months ago

It's really difficult to find any/many of these titles in English or German in Germany.

max_• 10 months ago

I just watched "The Road" yesterday night.

Good movie.

random_moonwalk2• 10 months ago

Are there any collections of annotated pages from books belonging to well-known authors that have been made available online? I'd be interested to get some impression of how they engaged with the material, whatever it is.

lourendotco• 10 months ago

you could start here https://archive.ph/M2H3s here you can find an archive of hannah arendt's marginalia and annotations https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hapl_marginalia_all/

random_moonwalk2• 10 months ago

Thanks, these are great! A link to some scans of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in the New Yorker piece too. For the curious: https://archive.ph/o/M2H3s/www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases...

ryanar• 10 months ago

Fascinating article. As I was reading it, particularly the part about his son John saying his father was very loving and was there for him, but also saying he did not like to be interrupted during his work or reading, and would say "Go away! I am reading!" immediately made me think he was quite narcissistic. His work was more important than even his own son. Later on his brother Dennis confirmed my suspicions that McCarthy was a narcissist. I have an insatiable curiosity as well and truly love learning, but in being a christian I have actively worked against my tendency to narcissism. A life like McCarthys sounds romantically fabulous, but when you think about the end of it, four people around your bed, it sounds tragic. There is something profound in sacrificially loving others and it doesn’t seem like Cormac experienced that. Though I am sure his wives, brother Dennis, and son John, did.

IncreasePosts• 10 months ago

There's nothing wrong with having boundaries. Anyways, the quote goes on:

"But he was a great father, always there for me, and I learned so much from him. We would have these long conversations about science and history and music, and whatever else, and he was the funniest person I’ve ever met, just a natural comedian.” "

f30e3dfed1c92• 10 months ago

What's wrong with dying with four people around your bed? Do you think that's too few or something?

polytely• 10 months ago

Thanks for posting, he was a really interesting guy.

This is my favourite interview with him so I will take this post as an excuse to share it.

https://youtu.be/HrUy1Vn2KdI

topologie2• 10 months ago

Was just about to post this.

Thank you.

pwillia7• 10 months ago

“I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

jermberj• 10 months ago

Gets me every time.

shawndrost• 10 months ago

I have loved Cormac's books since I was a child, but never read Larry McMurtry until recently. If you're in the same boat, I implore you to give one of the below a try.

Lonesome Dove -- A great story about washed-up Texas Rangers with achingly beautiful writing.

The Last Picture Show -- More tonally similar to Cormac's stories. Coming of age in a dusty Texas town.

Leaving Cheyenne -- I have never in my life recommended a romance novel until this moment. I'm literally crying as I write this, remembering the closing scene.

scarmig3• 10 months ago

If the revisionist Western appeals to you, I'd also recommend Oakley Hall's Warlock.

k3lsi3r• 10 months ago

Initially thought you may have meant revisionist as a slight, but I see that it's a sub-genre. For anyone else unfamiliar (from wikipedia):

The revisionist Western is a sub-genre of the Western fiction. Called a post-classical variation of the traditional Western, the revisionist subverts the myth and romance of the traditional by means of character development and realism to present a less simplistic view of life in the "Old West". While the traditional Western always embodies a clear boundary between good and evil, the revisionist Western does not.

cwmoore• 10 months ago

I had confused the two. Knew of McMurtry through his son James, writer of songs like Choctaw Bingo and Can’t Make It Here Anymore.

gaws• 10 months ago

It would be great if the researchers uploaded a text catalog of the archive.

t_serpico• 10 months ago

The answer stems from McCarthy’s deeply disparaging view of modern society, which he considered lost, divorced from nature, history and tradition and heading toward social collapse and apocalypse. “Cormac considered contemporary fiction a waste of time,” said Dennis, “because contemporary writers no longer have a legitimate culture to feed their souls.”

vittore• 10 months ago

Just listened to Broken Record episode and learned Cormac McCarthy had black Ferrari. Opened HN and we talk about his personal library. Time to read No Country For Old Man I guess.

ctrlp5• 10 months ago

Someone who enjoys this please enlighten me or show me a way into McCarthy's prose using examples of what's good. I tried several times to read his novels and I'm sorry, but it's just terrible. It's hard to put my finger on what is so unappealing. The closest I can come to what is bad about it is that it reads like farce without humor (if you take 'farce' to be a question of tempo, as in "tragedy sped up"). The opening to Blood Meridian (his masterpiece, I'm told) is just this endless stream of backstory that The Kid is supposed to have done or been but no exposition of anything. It sounds like the imagination of a 13yo boy playing with his GI Joes or super heroes. The fragmentary style and purply-pulpish register is very hard to take seriously. Where's the beef? Please post some passages that don't sound like common pulp fiction, unless that's what people are crowing about, in which case...I got nothin'.

ojosilva• 10 months ago

    “Do you think we’re going to die?”
    “No.”
    “We’re not?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because we’re carrying the fire.”
    “What fire?”
    “The fire inside. Goodness. That’s what we’re carrying.”

ctrlp5• 10 months ago

Not trying to piss on the fire but that's almost exactly the kind of thing I'm unable to enjoy. I guess I wonder "Who speaks like that?" It's wooden and affected to my ear. It comes across as needlessly obtuse. I'm not saying it's exceptional for that style, but to me it reads like so many YA fantasy novels from my youth, or maybe a /r/ for aspiring writers. If I'm being asked to work so hard to elucidate the symbolism or metaphorical content, then shouldn't I expect a little back in the form of beautiful English. If this were a poem (where obscurity is expected) I would say it's a meh poem just on the basis of not being very interesting. I get this is a father/son dialogue and maybe the terseness appeals to some, but I would ask those readers if that's how they talk to their own sons.

In the spirit of fairness, I found some fan favorites from /r/cormacmccarthy and if these are representative of his most powerful prose I don't know what to say:

"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."

A "heraldic tree...left afire"? That's, er, not good. It's actually bad. And "auxiliaries routed(?) forth into the inordinate(?) day"? This is like the guy in the Community Arts writing class who gets a lot of praise but could really use an editor.

And the 'ands' are just interminable. And this and that and the other thing and one more and something totally different but also this and that. Good lord, someone give this man a period, or even a semi-colon. Here's another exemplar of a sentence that runs on more than the horses in it.

"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."

"that resonance which is the world itself" is just royal purple prose.

I apologize for disliking something others like, it doesn't seem fair, but I get the feeling that Cormac McCarthy is one of those "favorites" for people who don't have a lot to compare it to. Anytime someone tells me their favorite author is Cormac McCarthy, I'm always tempted to ask, "Who's your second favorite?"

topologie2• 10 months ago

Just a reminder, that, as the article also says:

"Moby-Dick was Cormac McCarthy's favorite book"

... and mine too...

Cormac McCarthy's personal library

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