The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

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.

was just thinking that I dont even know what a country is. Not an easy question. It seems to be mostly an idea.

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.

You think that there are things which God will not permit, she had said. But he didnt think that at all.

The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.

In the morning he sat with his feet crossed under him and watched the sun rise. It sat swagged and red in the smoke like a matrix of molten iron swung wobbling up out of a furnace.

She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place. She wanted to not have been. Period.

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.

History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.

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

Vor mir keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine Sein.

Bueno. Pero si va a venir nadie, por qué está cerrada? Ah. No sé. Pero la llave es muy vieja. Es propiedad de la familia. Me entiendes? Sí. Por supuesto. Está bien.

A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.

The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.

Where the substance of a thing is an uncertain business the form can hardly command more ground. All reality is loss and all loss is eternal. There is no other kind. And that reality into which we inquire must first contain ourselves. And what are we? Ten percent biology and ninety percent nightrumor.

One cant speak for the dead. Who knows their lives? In any case it is the nature of people to imagine that the defeated must have done something to deserve their undoing. People want the world to be just. But the world is silent on this subject. To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause.

He was the fortunate one. To die in the war? To die in the war. To die in a state of belief. Yes. Belief in what? In what. How to say it. Belief in himself as a man in a land under arms for a cause that was just for a people he loved and the fathers of those people and their poetry and their pain and their God. I take it you’ve no such beliefs. No. Any beliefs at all? João pursed his lips. He wiped the bar. Well. Of course a man has beliefs. But I dont believe in ghosts. I believe in the reality of the world. The harder and the sharper the edges the more you believe. The world is here. It is not someplace else. I dont believe in traveling about. I believe that the dead are in the ground.

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.

In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.