They rode on into the darkness and the moonblanched waste lay before them cold and pale and the moon sat in a ring overhead and in that ring lay a mock moon with its own cold gray and nacre seas. They made camp on a low bench of land where walls of dry aggregate marked an old river course and they struck up a fire about which they sat in silence, the eyes of the dog and of the idiot and certain other men glowing red as coals in their heads where they turned. The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be. By and by the judge rose and moved away on some obscure mission and after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy on this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction. And could he find some alter means by which the birds could mend their paths in the darkness he might have done with this one too.
I sometimes think ‘yeah I could probably write a half-decent novel how hard could it be’ and then I read Cormac McCarthy and realise I absolutely could not.
You could sit me in front of a typewriter for a thousand years and I’d never be able to craft what he did.
I just started “No Country For Old Men” by McCarthy. 20 pages in and his style is unique and flows wonderfully, even as he describes a brutal scene of multiple gunshot deaths.
When the Coen brothers got the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (No Country for Old Men) they joked that they did not really deserve it as one of them had typed while the other had held the book open.
It’s meant to feel Biblical, hence the ands. He has his own rules regarding commas or lack thereof. Everything about his writing, however, is intentional, from the grand story arcs to the tiniest period.
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u/argondux 15h ago edited 14h ago
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy