Much love, Cormac.
Looking south from Muley Point at your stomping grounds, where "all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships."
Blood Meridian, 25th Anniversary Edition, page 259.
Map in Blood Meridian, 25th Anniversary Edition.
"Then about the meridian of the day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. "
One of Blood Meridian's origin stories. 25th Anniversary Edition, page 131.
"Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there a system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go."
The kid dreams of emergence + decomposability. p. 322.
Cormac + @sfiscience's Murray Gell-Mann became friends in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
On my drive I listened to Blood Meridian for the 1st time. I heard in the narration (very good, by Richard Poe) strong echoes of Melville. When I read myself, I feel the antecedents but the voice is clearly Cormac's. Cormac's everyday speech is very apparent in this passage.
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy echoing darkly in Judge Holden Borges' Book-Man. p. 297.
"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."
"They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
I once suggested at a dinner that Blood Meridian + Tropic of Cancer were siblings, w ToC presaging BM in its 2nd to final paragraph. Cormac laughed + said "I don't know about that, honey, but it is one of the greatest paragraphs in literature" and recited it word for word. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Cormac was aesthetically precise in everything he did. He loved fashion + for years we exchanged marked up copies of WWD. Descriptions of haberdashery abound in his books. Below, from Blood Meridian, p. 175.
The shoes he found at an antique store in Arizona. And, one of my… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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