I was already in the middle of reading The Passenger, the first of Cormac McCarthy’s paired final novels, when the news of his death came yesterday. I don’t really know what to say. I knew these would be his last books, knew he was ready to die with their release. But his death still hit me. There are only a small handful of writers, musicians, or directors where I’ve consumed everything (or very close to everything) they’ve created, and McCarthy is one. My relationship with his words feels private, a creative conversation I’ve had in my head as I read, an invisible influence on my own way of seeing and writing about the world. That’s the thing with making art, right? You put it out there and it’s not yours anymore. Your audience responds to it how they will and you never know what it is. McCarthy didn’t seem like he wanted to know anyway. His work—with its dark view of human nature, its extreme violence, his condemnation and adoration of the American narrative, and his refusal to apply a simple morality—is often misunderstood or simply hated. In the small, cult following of McCarthy’s novels, I believe a very slim percentage of those people are women. Perhaps this is why my feelings about his work and his death feel personal, too complicated to put words to. I think the right word is stunned. Stunned with its old French origins in “astonish,” a bell after being struck, after the toll has died and all that’s left is reverberation.
There’s an anecdote I like about Cormac McCarthy. He was deeply private, refusing to give interviews or talk about his writing. His first ex-wife has even complained that in their time living in poverty in a dairy barn outside Knoxville, “We were bathing in the lake. Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”
Although Notions & Notes is, essentially, a list of recommendations for interesting things to think about, I can’t in good faith recommend Cormac McCarthy’s books. I can, however, recommend listening to him talk about cave art, time, metaphysics, and climate change. It was sort of an accidental discovery when I was driving around and “Science Friday” came on. Ira Flatow had the brilliant idea to ask “what happens if I put Cormac McCarthy, Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss in a room together and just let them talk?” There are so many incredible moments in this conversation. Among them is this fitting-for-now response from McCarthy about the grimness of his writing:
If you look at classical literature, the core of literature is the idea of tragedy, and that's - you know, you don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you. But tragedy is at the core of human experience, and it's what we have to deal with. That's what makes life difficult, and that's what we know about. It's what we want to know how to deal with. It's unavoidable. There's nothing you can do to forestall it. So how do you deal with it?
There is also a moment near the end of the conversation where Werner Herzog reads in the Werner Herzog voice a passage he loves from All the Pretty Horses. I remember hearing it and feeling my breath stop. It begins at about the 38-minute mark.
Listen to the whole episode.