Xavier Ray > Recent Status Updates

“Leaving him to scrutinize with his trying eyes the calamitous advance of the sun.”
McCarthy writes as if the dead still see. The eyes remain open not out of life but because the universe itself keeps watching through them. In his world, perception doesn’t end with death—it’s the lingering consciousness of matter, the cosmos observing its own indifference.

The fire — that fragile human light — is torn away by the wind as if drawn into an unseen whirlpool of nothingness. In the face of that cosmic emptiness, all of humanity’s motion and understanding are abolished.

Perfect instinct — that’s the line that captures it. Here’s a concise Goodreads-ready version that builds around it:

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When the white Jackson steps into the black Jackson’s shadow, it awakens the ancestral memory of violence and survival that sleeps in all men. The act feels less like insult than ritual—a trespass against the soul itself, where even a man’s shadow bears the weight of his being.

This moment in captivity that starts Chapter Six feels almost merciful. After the raw exposure of the desert, there’s shelter, walls, and a fragile sense of safety. McCarthy lets both reader and character breathe before returning to the vast, violent order that governs men, earth, and sky alike.

“the carrion birds …with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.” The image fuses the sacred and the profane: scavengers turned priests, performing a grim liturgy over the dead town. Their “exhortation” is not mourning but obedience to the natural order—. The carrion birds are McCarthy’s priests of entropy, their black wings lifted in reverence to the law of death.

Violence is not exceptional to humanity; it is the grammar of existence. The riders, folded into this prehistoric landscape, are just another layer in its stratigraphy — ephemeral figures crossing a planet already ancient, already blooded.

So far I have found this book to be utterly brilliant. Maybe one of my favorite reads ever. McCarthy writes like no other. Biblical. Violence part and parcel of being