The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

a small latterday autoarchon out of the high clavens of dingbatry flapping about in your prenubile boudoir.

Legend

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.

having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.

And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade.

Like most people he liked being consulted.

When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they werent supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fastened on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important to them to believe than to know. Does that make sense to you?

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.

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 think that there are things which God will not permit, she had said. But he didnt think that at all. His shadow from the motel lights fell away over the raw stubble. The trucks grew fewer. No wind. Silence. The little carpetcolored vipers coiled out there in the dark. 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. He’d thought of his father little in recent years. He thought of him now.

Shivers

just because the world was spinning didnt mean that you couldnt get off.

evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.

Why can you not bury him? Are his hands so red? Fathers are always forgiven. In the end they are forgiven. Had it been women who dragged the world through these horrors there would be a bounty on them.

As for being stood against a wall and shot down with a machinegun this was a thing which Pau did not outlive. In the end it became who he was. It is what we are discussing now. For instance. A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity. He never married. He was treated with respect, of course. But in the end you must remember he was shot for nothing. The defeated have their cause and the victors have their victory. Were there times he wished he’d died along with his friends? Doubtless.

in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost. It’s not that I love paradoxes. It’s just that they’ve increasingly come to seem the last factual reality.

You called me a visionary of universal ruin. But there was no vision to it. It was at best a hope. You were the visionary. You had the tools for it. I’d no grief in my heart, Squire. That was what was missing. I was always envious of you. For that among other reasons.

And all the while a past we hardly even knew is rolled over into our lives like a dubious investment.

if there is a common keel to our understanding it is that we are flawed. At our core that is what we know. You think that we loathe ourselves.

So how bad is the world? How bad. 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. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: 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? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?

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.

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.

He was my brother. Older than me. He died in the war. I’m sorry. It’s all right. 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.

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. I suppose at one time I was like old Pau. I waited to hear from God and I never did. Yet he remained a believer and I did not. He would shake his head at me. He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death.

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.