Cormac McCarthy passed away this month but his timeless wisdom will haunt us every moment. Thank you sir!
This little essay based on learning from McCarthy's novel The Road is one of my favorite essays I revisit.
My favorite human, John Gray pays tribute to McCarthy. I didn't realize he lived in Santa Fe and spent time with complexity scientists - that tells a lot about his wise nature.
The film’s screenplay was the only one written for cinema by Cormac McCarthy. Critics assailed it as a nihilistic tale of amorality and cruelty, containing no hope of redemption – a charge commonly levelled against McCarthy’s novels. The Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro, however, recognised the story as “a meditation on the illusory nature of normalcy”. It is a penetrating insight into McCarthy’s work as a whole. With his death on 13 June at the age of 89 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, we have lost one of the greatest explorers of what lies beyond the shaky constructs on which we rely to guide us through life.
In a time in which human consciousness is regarded as possibly more real, and certainly more interesting, than anything that may exist outside it, McCarthy explored regions that are shut off from quotidian awareness. Our illusion of normalcy is a psychological defence mechanism. Human life is more discontinuous and extreme than our mental maps of it. We retain our balance by continually redacting our experiences, blocking out their riddling uncertainties with grandiose claims to knowledge.
McCarthy loved the company of scientists, spending much of his later life in conversation with them at the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complex phenomena. But he saw scientific enquiry as demarcating the limits of understanding, and one reason his work resists interpretation is that for him the world defies explanation.
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In its surrender to mystery, McCarthy’s sensibility was religious. Unlike the religions with which we are familiar, he does not offer any glimpse of a final harmony. Even Buddhism, by the standards of Western monotheism an atheist faith, holds out the prospect of nirvana, release from suffering. McCarthy comes closer to the faiths of ancient Mexico, on which DH Lawrence drew in The Plumed Serpent (1926). There is no evidence that he read the prolific English writer, but there are parallels between the religion implicit in McCarthy’s novels and that sketched in Lawrence’s writings on Mexico. In both, human beings are not accidentally embodied minds but mortal creatures of flesh and blood, whose fates are as random and inescapable as those of birds and toads. All living things find themselves in a state of war. As Judge Holden put it:
“It makes no difference what men think of war… As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
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Aside from his lapidary prose and lyrical evocations of the beauty of landscape, the chief feature of McCarthy’s writings is their relentless assault on solipsism. The reigning philosophies of the age insist the world can be remade in the shape of human ideas and beliefs. There is unending discussion of what “we” must do, as if changes in how a few people think or talk could deliver them and all humankind from the consequences of their actions. Idle chatter of this kind distracts from the reality that the world does not need our consent to its workings.
For those who cling, anxiously and ever more desperately, to faith in the transformative power of human thought and agency, McCarthy’s work can only be intensely disturbing, if not thoroughly repellent. What value could his bleak vision have for us? McCarthy turns the question back on itself. In the Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men, the assassin Anton Chigurh asks his fellow hitman Carson Wells before he kills him: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” A similar question can be posed to McCarthy’s humanist critics: if your philosophies have brought the world to its present state, of what value are your philosophies? No amount of thinking and no exercise of will can save the human animal from itself. For the intrepid literary explorer, grace in a human being means living with this truth.
