[ryanfreeborn]

Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

--

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

--

In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

--

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.

[ali_m]

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

[everybodyknows]

> continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

It occurs to me now that this echoes a scene late in Moby Dick in which Ahab smashes his sextant to the deck and declares that henceforth he will navigate by dead reckoning alone, without reference to the sun or stars or like works of God.

[ryanfreeborn]

Ya McCarthy borrows heavily from Melville and Faulkner, which he readily cops to. Judge Holden and Ahab have a lot in common.

[everybodyknows]

Holden is presented as immortal, a figure for the devil in the Christian sense (in No Country For Old Men, the assassin Chigurh approximates this). Moby Dick's white whale is perhaps immortal, though not a devil figure to any modern reader.

Captain Ahab is mortal and goes down with all but one of the crew of the Pequod, like Glanton who dies along with most of his gang at the hands of the Yuma. Both leaders are proud and defiant to the last and are justly killed (though we have to feel first mate Starbuck at least deserved better).

Both Glanton and Ahab are undisputed masters of their respective expeditions, and both leave behind young families at the outset, though for different reasons: Glanton flees the law, Ahab sails voluntarily.

[meigwilym]

Do you have any Faulkner recommendations?

[huthuthike]

My favorite of his is As I Lay Dying. I find it much more readable than The Sound and the Fury. The latter is his most famous, and McCarthy's favorite work by Faulkner. But Faulkner himself said As I Lay Dying was his magnum opus.

[ryanfreeborn]

Yes, exactly what huthuthike said. As I Lay Dying. Sound & Fury is great but a much more challenging read.

[jeegsy]

Good Lord these quotes. What have I been doing in my life that I've never read this man? The imagery in these passages are so vivid, I reflexively started reading aloud after the first one. I gotta find his books now though with his passing, I suspect many will have the same idea.

[prawn]

Go read Blood Meridian. And then struggle to suffer anything else in the world compared against it. It is stunning.

[jaredhallen]

I have read a lot of tgese, and still felt compelled to read them aloud. To my 6 and 7 year old children, no less. I did need to skim them first, though. He's not particularly known as being "safe for work" as they say in the Reddit world.

[Tao3300]

> ...on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.

Now that's how you introduce a character!

[everybodyknows]

Here McCarthy employs again to great effect his device of a narrator that knows and will tell of all physical events past and future. The narrator however does not know, though will speculate upon, thoughts of the characters:

... with them now rode a boy named Sloat who had been left sick to die in this place by one of the gold trains bound for the coast weeks earlier. ... He rode near the head of the column and he must have counted himself well out of that place but if he gave thanks to any god at all it was ill-timed for the country was not done with him.

[rdiddly]

Something something Glanton... he was complete at every hour... he would chase the sun to its final endarkenment in the West as if it had been ordained ages since...

That's one of the ones I remember, if you loosen the definition of "remember." I liked it because here's the ostensible leader of a gang of homicidal mo fo's, and not because of that, not despite it, but possibly quite irrelevantly to it, he's just as sure of himself and his "vision" as any other person we would normally think of as a leader.

[everybodyknows]

The Delawares stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores.

--

... they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.

[dclowd9901]

I love that he didn’t shy away from prose that almost read as biblical even though he risked drawing comparison to it. The authority and confidence he wrote with.

[aksss]

> War as always here

Brings to mind Thucydides: “Of the Gods we believe, and of man we know, that by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they shall. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted on it. We did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time. And we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do.”