Tagged with: Literature
"It is worth noting how many of the Dictionary's clichés touch on sophisticated disciplines such as theology, science and politics, without going anywhere very clever with them...now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed...The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools."
“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
La danse macabre - an artistic genre of late medieval allegory on the universality of death. I blame a French lit class that I took in college for leading me to make this immediate connection upon finishing this book, but doing so helps me to quantify the incredible intensity of both gruesome narrative and philosophical commentary that somehow condensed itself into less than 350 pages. After reading both Blood Meridian and The Road , I have begun to develop a fascination with McCarthy’s ability to tell so much in his omission of unnecessary facts, his omission of distracting detail and his inclusion of only the most relevant and impacting elements, and the most meaningful thoughts to convey an even more illuminating truth. This was a difficult read, because of the subject matter, but I will confess, it was worth it.
View all my reviews
