The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures.

I dreamt you were wandering in your weighted shoes over the ocean floor. Seeking God knows what in the darkness of those bathypelagic deeps. When you reached the edge of the Nazca Plate there were flames licking up from the abyss. The sea boiling. In my dream it seemed to me you’d stumbled upon the mouth of hell and I thought that you would lower a rope to those of your friends who’d gone before. You didnt.

How many times were you wounded? Anything can be a fucking wound.

The low tide lapped and drew back. He could be the first person in creation. Or the last.

He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Dont close your eyes.

The weight of it moving over him. Endlessly, endlessly. In a sense of the relentless passing of time like nothing else.

In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.

You believe that the loss of those you loved has absolved you of all else. Let me tell you a story. There were thirty-seven of her letters and although he knew them each by heart he read them over and over. All save the last. He had asked her if she believed in an afterlife and she said that she did not discount such a thing. That it could be. She just doubted that it could be for her. If there was a heaven, was it not founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned? Lastly she said that God was not interested in our theology but only in our silence.

When he woke later far to the north a desert city was passing under the wing and sliding off into the darkness like the Crab Nebula. A cast of stones upon a jeweler’s blackcloth. Her hair was like gossamer. He wasnt sure what gossamer was. Her hair was like gossamer.

I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.

But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence. And yet it moved.

He went back to his bunk and lay in the sweet darkness. The storm had passed. The deep throb of the prime mover walked the bowl slowly across the table. Below them the drillbit turning a mile deep in the unimaginable blackness of the earth.

Because beauty has power to call forth a grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies. The loss of a great beauty can bring an entire nation to its knees. Nothing else can do that.

When was the last time you just sat by yourself. Watched it get dark. Watched it get light. Thought about your life. Where you’d been and where you were goin. Was there a reason for any of it. Is there?

For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until…What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.

I dont have any tragedies in my life to give it a form and destination outside of my control. I like what I’m doing. But I could be doing something else. I’ve been blessed. I’m not even sure I’d change the bad things.

Out at sea the ragged wire filaments of lightning stood briefly and then again along the darkening rim of the world.

You got people who think it would be a good idea to discover the true nature of darkness. The hive of darkness and the lair thereof. You can see them out there with their lanterns. What is wrong with this picture?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.

People want to be reimbursed for their pain. They seldom are.

In the coming night he thought that men would band together in the hills. Feeding their small fires with the deeds and the covenants and the poetry of their fathers. Documents they’d no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls.

The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.

People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.

Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.

He sat with the blanket around him and watched the distant dark of the sea with its shifting cape of stars where they lifted and fell. It came again, the pale ignition of a storm that shaped out the window and cast it brief and shuddering upon the farther wall. A sheet of light flaring silently over the storied sea, the thunderheads along the horizon shaped in the rim lightning and the slow leaden lap like slag in a vat and the slight smell of ozone.

The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.

When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

You cant be sure that another man’s happiness resembles your own. But where the collective of pain is concerned there can be little doubt at all.

To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all. I wish you calm waters, Squire. I always did.

Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.

We pour water upon the child and name it. Not to fix it in our hearts but in our clutches. The daughters of men sit in half darkened closets inscribing messages upon their arms with razorblades and sleep is no part of their life.

He’d seen him one final time in a dream. God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest. Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.

The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train.

He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.