Blood Meridian Illustration project by Zack Smith

Malone Dies - pg. 34

And perhaps there is none, no morrow any more, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks look all alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and its unchanging calm.

[This could be taken as an alternate-reading of The Road's premise.]

TedG: Noir, No Country...

McCarthy's writing style comes after the Clancy/Ludlum model where things are diced into parallel episodes but unified in a grand arc driven by the cosmic principle that good triumphs and the bad guys get punished. This has become the cinematic norm, so whenever we pass through a scene-story, we know how it fits in a universe powered by a machine of justice.....

The other cinematic notion that McCarthy uses is noir, and I am certain that it is what attracted the Coens. They've spent their entire careers surrounding this notion, probing it from all directions. In absolute terms, what defines noir is the notion that the machinery of the universe is arbitrary and linked to the act of viewing. That "viewing" piece has stickiness, because it involves us in what happens to the characters in the world we witness. McCarthy makes us explicitly complicit in the unraveling of ordinary, even expected justice.

The Road - Closing - pg. 241

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

The Road - pg. 181

Still he could see open country to the east and the air was different. Then they came upon it from a turn in the road and they stopped and stood with the salt wind blowing in their hair where they'd lowered the hoods of their coats to listen. Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I'm sorry it's not blue, he said. That's okay, said the boy.

The Road - pg. 111

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

The Road - pg. 46

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.

The Road - Opening

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

- Cormac McCarthy

ALFRED A. KNOPF
NEW YORK
2007

Jameson on Bookclub 2007

A shot of Jameson can make you stronger. It heals the internal abrasions, cellular distortions, quiet desperations. I had a shot with Freddy at the bar and said something really obnoxious and narcissistic to him. Elizabeth and Ed were working at the bar. I gave Blood Meridian to Elizabeth to give it to Jeremy. Jeremy had left The Road on the rack above the taps, with a piece of paper inside it. No one had read the book, well except me and Freddy and Dain. Every one else was just there to show up to have a good time and that we did. I tried Emily's wine and did find some sort of chocolate notes going on which was kind of surprising. It was not bad. hey ordered it without knowing much about the it from the wine list. Danielle insisted about the importance of family, folks and other such themes. I tried not to get into an argument. it was definitely a weird night. Brett could not show up which sucked. He was the fourth person of the book club who actually did finish up the book. We did have a brief discussion on the book because Freddy wanted to. We ended up at Shaggy's later that night where I ran into Dana/Lindsey duo. It turned out it was Dana's birthday so I bought her a shot. She was pretty far gone by that time and thus ended our another anonymous midsummer evening at the main street of this town. On a second thought, we made a trek to the diner where we played Bob Dylan at a jukebox for old time's sake. Like a rolling stone...

"I like to read a good book..."

So, last night I was sitting at the bar having the taste of my second Guinness in a month and then Ed bought me a shot of Jameson, so yea the second-first taste of that too; and this girl was closing her tab and asked me about a good book to read. Jeremy and I were having our usual comparing-the-book-notes moment across the bar, he wanted to bring The Road's copy that he had been meaning to and I was gonna exchange it with The Blood Meridien. Then, came the comment nudging the conversation, about a 90 degree off-kilter to the side-rails, on "reading a good book": What good book? How would one get one? and more importantly, What good a good book would do to anyone? - I didn't know about any of that. It just threw me off.

Or the Evening Redness in the West

I am blown away by Cormac McCarthy's writing. Blood Meridian was the first book, i read by him. The novel mainly takes place in 1840s in south-of-Texas and south western united states where the scalp trade was thriving. It is a novel about journey set in an unforgiving terrain which haunts and overwhelms the travelers who are out to kill and claim material possessions, lucre. But it is also, a novel set in a biblical space where questions about the nature of Man and his propensity to violence and questions about Nature itself haunts the murderers who are out to move out West in their contractual obligations to kill as many native Indians as possible.

"Is it? Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown and where is the priest? He leaned closer. Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where are the ladies, ah the fair and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor's ball when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you'd elected to defend? And where is the fiddler and where the dance?
...I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
...Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance."

--Blood Meridian