R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 24

Graham Greene: Heart of the Matter

It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose—they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed. He felt a sudden affection for Yusef. He said, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right. One day, Yusef, you’ll find my foot under your fat arse.’ ‘Maybe, Major Scobie, or maybe we’ll be friends together. That is what I should like more than anything in the world.’

Eastern Phoebe (Video)

 

Cormac McCarthy: The Crossing

Among the defenders of Durango there were of course few foreigners yet there was one such. A German Huertista named Wirtz who was a captain in the federal army. The captured rebels stood in the street chained together with fencewire like toys and this man walked their enfilade and bent to study each in turn and note in their eyes the workings of death as the assassinations continued behind him. The man spoke Spanish well for all that he spoke it with a german accent and he told the artillero that only the most pathetic of fools would die for a cause that was both wrong and doomed and the captive spat in his face. The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.

San Pedro: Peregrine Fledgling

My overachieving sib has pestered me all morning ("Get up you lie-abed") and now he's taken off.

Just two new peregrines @ Fermin Point (San Pedro CA). HAPPY HUMP DAY!!!♥️🎈

#rlswihart13 #sanpedro #twonewperegrines #dontflyaway #staywithme #peregrinesofinstagram #peregrinenewbies #art #nature #poetry #beauty #readmorepoetry2024❤️🎈🪶

Cormac McCarthy: The Crossing

The coyotes were still calling all along the stone ramparts of the Pilares and it was graying faintly in the east. He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.

Fledgling Peregrine

 

Cormac McCarthy: The Crossing

In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.

Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty

Cole. John Grady Cole. The reverend extended his hand and they shook, the reverend thoughtful. Cole, he said. We may of had a Cole. I’d hate to say we hadnt. Have you had your supper? No sir. Darlin maybe Mr Cole would like to take supper with us. You like chicken and dumplins Mr Cole? Yessir I do. I been partial to em all my life. Well you’re fixin to get more partial cause my wife makes the best you ever ate. They ate in the kitchen. She said: We just eat in the kitchen now that there’s just the two of us. He didnt ask who was missing. The reverend waited for her to be seated and then he bowed his head and blessed the food and the table and the people sitting at it. He went on at some length and blessed everything all the way up to the country and then he blessed some other countries as well and he spoke about war and famine and the missions and other problems in the world with particular reference to Russia and the jews and cannibalism and he asked it all in Christ’s name amen and raised up and reached for the cornbread.

Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty

It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.

Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty

My father had a great sense of the connectedness of things. I’m not sure I share it. He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes.