Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

Harrogate wounded and covered in shit found in his pocket a pennybox of matches and a candlestub and made a light.

Tom sawyer

dark closed over him so absolute that he became without boundary to himself, as large as all the universe and small as anything that was.

cuspidine.

coprolitic

becrept

Bishop Hatto

slaverous

the city mouse wore only shreds of clothing and he was covered with dried sewage. True news of man here below.

morling

Gimpen

windscrew

pellagrous

splo

bonepipes.

Fingers like old bananas, that fat, that brown.

the old lie that beholder and beheld are ever more than one,

Subject object. The oldest philosophy.

Graymalkin,

he took a bus to Gatlinburg.

The first few dawns half made him nauseous, he’d not seen one dead sober for so long.

Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed.

sabletressed

rimpled

Suttree lay on a warm rock above the river and watched the trout drift and quarter over the cold gray stones.

Big two hearted river

rutwarped

bowbacked

mucronate

shal...

shells...

flangeous

kingscord,

His beard grew long and his clothes fell from him like the leaves.

Is this Siddhartha

He had begun to become accompanied. First in dreams and then in states half wakeful. One day in the full light of autumn noon he saw an elvish apparition

Before two days more had gone he hardly knew if he dreamt or not.

Enlightenment

He slumped and crossed his wrists in his lap.

Lotus

he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth’s core sucking his bones, a moment’s giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. His fingers clutched up wet handfuls from the bar, polished lozenges of slate, small cold and mascled granite teardrops. He let them fall through his fingers in a smooth clatter. He could feel the oilless turning of the earth beneath him and the cup of water lay in his stomach as cold as when he drank it.

parallactically

wortled

pauldron

He saw with a madman’s clarity the perishability of his flesh.

Illbedowered

wivern

Nemoral

You wouldnt tell on a feller for poachin him a little deermeat would ye? I dont dine at the king’s table, said Suttree. The hunter spat to one side and shook his head at Suttree. You’re loony as a didapper, he said.

androleptic

albified

cameral

Suttree suddenly began to cry.

Enlightenment Eludes

simonist.

He was seized with a thing he’d never known, a sudden understanding of the mathematical certainty of death.

jissom.