The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

Which of course raises the old question of inner ailings and outer and where to draw the line. Always an issue. Not everything malodorous is a memory.

let’s just say it was something about a small latterday autoarchon out of the high clavens of dingbatry flapping about in your prenubile boudoir.

And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark. What’s in a shadow? Do they move along at the speed of the light that casts them? How deep do they get?

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.

Your love is not so likely to resemble a red red rose as a red red rash.

But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.

Anyway, Hoffer has it right. Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.

My father was a free agent. A lot of people thought that S-Matrix theory was a reasonable theory. Promising, even. It was just superseded by chromodynamics. Ultimately by string theory. Supposedly.

Did Einstein work with Boltzmann?

Should science by some miracle forge on into the future it will uncover not only new laws of nature but new natures to have laws about. The

Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception.

Kant’s view of quantum mechanics—and I quote—is “that which is not adapted to our powers of cognition.”

Is that painful to you? Everything is painful to me. I think. Maybe I’m just a painful person.

Well. In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get.

Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know, Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway.

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.

I believe in God’s design. I’ve had dark hours and I’ve had dark doubts in those hours. But that was never one of them.

His grandmother was born in eighteen ninety-seven. McKinley was president and the country was at war with Spain. There was no electricity, no telephone, no radio, no television, no cars, no planes. No heat, no airconditioning. In most of the world no running water and no toilets. Life had changed little since the middle ages.

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? I think that if there was a reason then that would just be one more thing to inquire about. My notion is you probably make up reasons after you’ve decided what it is you’re goin to do. Or not do.

What’s the worst thing you can be? Borman thought about that. A piece of shit. There aint no reprieve from that. Total contempt. Total.

Do you think you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself?

I suppose that when a man is sick of pussy he’s sick of life but I do think the bitches may have finally done me in. God but we’re fools.

Oh you do occasionally find one who flies her true colors. It’s even refreshing in a way. A bitch to the teeth, fair field and no favor. Dried scrotums strung on a cord hanging from the footboard. But these other ones. The shy smile and the downturned eyes. Jesus. Spare me.

Anyway, you can complain bitterly about the fair sex and still maintain a grudging admiration. I’d even make the claim that if you’ve never contemplated killing a woman you’ve probably never been in love.

I’ve never understood why justice wasnt supposed to be for sale. Perhaps including a reasonable credit plan. What’s so special about justice?

We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet. I’m not sure I see the distinction. It’s just that the passing of time is irrevocably the passing of you. And then nothing. I suppose it should be a comfort to understand that one cannot be dead forever where there’s no forever to be dead in.

If someone said to you that you had thrown your life away over a woman what would you say? Well thrown.

I think half the time she thought I was there just to pick her brain. Well fuck it. Maybe I was. Half the time. Some evil little shit from some heretofore unknown hinterworld to ferry data back to Base One to gear up for the big one.

dont give a solitary rhapsodic fart what

just didnt want to lose anything else. I’m all lost out.

He was wet and chilled. Finally he stopped. What do you know of grief? he called. You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.

You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none. The truth is that everyone is under arrest.

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

What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always

Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture itself is going to drag up out of the murk. I dont know how one does mathematics. I dont know that there is a way. The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they dont just go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself.

I dont know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure that I want to. Know. If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it. I probably dont want to live it anyway. I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. 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.

The highballs are on me. As the giraffe said to the bartender.

I dont think they should necessarily be gassed but is neutering so out of the question?

What puzzles me is the apparent need to fabricate evil gossip about one whose actual history is already so appalling.

No more questions. Who am I what am I where am I. Of what stuff is the moon stamped. What’s the plural of woodwose.

You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.

You see yourself as a tragic figure. No I dont. Not even close. A tragic figure is a person of consequence. Which you are not.

We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days. He’d thought of his father little in recent years. He thought of him now.

I dont know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means.

Did she ever talk to you about the little friends that used to visit her? Sure. I asked her how come she could believe in them but she couldnt believe in Jesus. What did she say? She said that she’d never seen Jesus. But you have. If I remember. Yes. What did he look like? He doesnt look like something. What would he look like? There’s not something for him to look like.

No. The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know. Let me quote Thomas Barefoot to you. His truth is not going to come back to him void. It’s going to do what he wants it to do. You might want to think about that.

Anyway, when you have seen Jesus once you have seen him forever. Case closed. Forever. Yeah. He’s a forever kind of guy.

I dont believe anything about God. I just believe in God. Kant had it right about the stars above and the truth within. The last light the nonbeliever will see will not be the dimming of the sun. It will be the dimming of God. Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to. You think his patience is infinite? I think we’re probably almost there.

Do you think most people want to die? No. Most is a lot. Do you? I dont know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die. Would you? In a heartbeat.