 |
| Books by Cormac McCarthy |
There are a very few authors who's books I have read and collected all of..., and Cormac McCarthy is one of those select few. There wasn't room on the shelf to include two others that you can see a small corner of off on the right..., and one novella I have on my Kindle. I had read an excerpt of "All the Pretty Horses" in Esquire Magazine..., back in the day when it was a monthly literary magazine and not the "Men's Journal" that it later became. But I hadn't started my "library" at that time..., when I did, it was one of my first purchases. Next came the three volume book at the top of the picture. Being the frugal sort of being that I am..., I usually wait for paperback versions to come out before I spend money..., but when "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road" came out..., I managed to somehow pry the money out of my wallet for the hard cover editions.
I haven't dusted off these old books for quite some time..., other than after the fire and a few moves to get them to their new home..., until last week. I found a post on my Substack Page from a guy who is another Cormac McCarthy fan and a little more well educated than I am. Here is a link to his post and a copy of the passage from "All the Pretty Horses" that he does an analysis of:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-183603101
“They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
I commented on the post with a passage that I really liked from another McCarthy book. I can't do that sort of explaining of this passage from "The Crossing" that still takes my breath away every time I read it. The first time I was on the transit bus that I used to ride to the job every morning..., I had to restrain myself from standing up on that moving bus and shouting it out to all those snoozing passengers on the bus. And I have quoted it to several friends via email that I thought might appreciate it as well..., I hope you do too..., I keep a book marker in place for just such times as this:
"He camped that night on the broad Animas Plain and the wind blew in the grass and he slept on the ground wrapped in the serape and in the wool blanket the old man had given him. He built a small fire but he had little wood and the fire died in the night and he woke and watched the winter stars slip their hold and race to their deaths in the darkness. He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse's mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and saw far to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all."
And since this post is about cowboys and the author has passed away..., I guess James McMurtry's "Vaquero" is a fitting song for your Friday Nite Music Video...,
