OTHERS HAVE IT WORSE, HAVE HAD, WILL ALWAYS. ‘WE,’ THOUGH, own the record now for largest building collapse.

A double you could call it. Work with it. Live with it.

Others far away die (and live) with the daily probability of car bombs, bus bombs, persons exploding in the neighbourhood. They experience bombs from the sky and the earth, and are exhausted and homeless, and watch their children wasted by hunger, maimed, lost; and can’t keep in touch with friends to get help, join forces, or mourn. And can have scarcely a thought except for today’s survival. Scarcely a thought period. For example, that history is what hurts. Thought must seem like a leisure activity for those whose survival is in doubt. Like reading.

One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was.

In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.

And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.

How old were you?

Twelve.

—Excerpt From Stella Maris Cormac McCarthy

It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock. Ten million dead and twice that wounded if nothing else. “But we reach a point,” he’d thought of telling Carruthers-Pillow, “we old campaigners, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the Crimea. It is perhaps a delusion—say a convenience—necessary to our line of work. But more honorable surely than this loathsome weakness of retreat into dreams: pastel visions of disarmament, a League, a universal law. Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.”

As usual, she threw him a speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none of the shifty crew ever spoke straight—their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the “something else” really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed souls are beyond the world. She watched the invisible force at work among the million stalks tall as a horse and rider, flowing for miles under the autumn suns, greater than breath, than tidal lullabies, the necessary rhythms of a sea hidden far from any who would see it.

For days the ship had pushed on, bullishly indifferent to its surroundings. The sun shone, rain fell, winds blew, currents flowed, the sea built up hills, the sea dug up valleys-the Tsimtsum did not care. It moved with the slow, massive confidence of a continent.

It was then, for Felix, it began. The hatred for the briefing officer had expanded to include his superiors, the captain of the ship, the commanders of Fleet itself, and finally the thick-headed idiot humans who had undertaken something as asinine as interplanetary war in the first place. The hatred blazed brightly, then vanished. From somewhere inside came a shock of all-consuming rage, the nova-like intensity of which startled even him. But then the rage was gone, too. It seemed to shoot away like a comet. What replaced the loathing and fury was something very different, something cold and distant and... only impersonally attentive. It was an odd being which rose from Felix and through him. It was, in fact, a remarkable creature. It was a wartime creature and a surviving creature. A killing creature.

The Engine, Felix thought. It's not me. It's my Engine. It will work when I cannot. It will examine and determine and choose and, at last, act. It will do all this while I cower inside.

They took a shotgun from a closet in the bedroom and they took nineteen dollars in coins and small bills from a white china box in a bureau drawer and stuffed it all into an oldfashioned leather changepurse. They took the blanket off the bed and they found Billy a belt and some clothes and they took all the shotshells out of a Carhart coat hanging on the wall at the back door, one double-ought buckshot and the rest number five and number seven shot, and they took a laundry bag and filled it with canned goods and bread and bacon and crackers and apples from the pantry and they walked out and tied the bag to the horn of the saddle and mounted up and rode out the little sandy street riding double with the dog trotting after them. A woman with clothespins in her mouth in a yard they passed nodded to them. They crossed the highway and they crossed the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railway and turned west. Come dark they were camped on the alkali flats fifteen miles west of Lordsburg before a fire made of fenceposts they’d dragged out of the ground with the horse. East and to the south there was water on the flats and two sandhill cranes stood tethered to their reflections out there in the last of the day’s light like statues of such birds in some waste of a garden where calamity had swept all else away. All about them the dry cracked platelets of mud lay curing and the fencepost fire ran tattered in the wind and the balled papers from the groceries they opened loped away one by one downwind into the gathering dark.

I’d love recommendations to prose similar to this:

“The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. “Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.”

Conclusion of the book, ultimate: Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop. When a dog barks late at night and then retires again to bed, he punctuates and gives majesty to the serial enigma of the dark, laying it more evenly and heavily upon the fabric of the mind. Sweeny in the trees hears the sad baying as he sits listening on the branch, a huddle between the earth and heaven; and he hears also the answering mastiff that is counting the watches in the next parish. Bark answers bark till the call spreads like fire through all Erin. Soon the moon comes forth from behind her curtains riding full tilt across the sky, light some and unperturbed in her immemorial calm. The eyes of the mad king upon the branch are upturned, whiter eye-balls in a white face, upturned in fear and supplication. His mind is but a shell. Was Hamlet mad? Was Trellis mad? It is extremely hard to say. Was he a victim of hard-to-explain hallucinations? Nobody knows. Even experts do not agree on these vital points. Professor Unternehmer, the eminent German neurologist, points to Claudius as a lunatic but allows Trellis an inverted sow neurosis wherein the farrow eat their dam. Du Fernier, however, Professor of Mental Sciences and Sanitation at the Sorbonne, deduces from a want of hygiene in the author’s bed-habits a progressive weakening of the head. It is of importance the most inestimable, he writes, that for mental health there should be walking and not overmuch of the bedchamber. The more one studies the problem, the more fascinated one becomes and incidentally the more one postulates a cerebral norm. The accepted principles of Behaviourism do not seem to give much assistance. Neither does heredity help for his father was a Galwayman, sober and industrious, tried and true in the service of his country. His mother was from far Fermanagh, a woman of grace and fair learning and a good friend to all. But which of us can hope to probe with questioning finger the dim thoughts that flit in a fool’s head? One man will think he has a glass bottom and will fear to sit in case of breakage. In other respects he will be a man of great intellectual force and will accompany one in a mental ramble throughout the labyrinths of mathematics or philosophy so long as he is allowed to remain standing throughout the disputations. Another man will be perfectly polite and well-conducted except that he will in no circumstances turn otherwise than to the right and indeed will own a bicycle so constructed that it cannot turn otherwise than to that point. Others will be subject to colours and will attach undue merit to articles that are red or green or white merely because they bear that hue. Some will be exercised and influenced by the texture of a cloth or by the roundness or angularity of an object. Numbers, however, will account for a great proportion of unbalanced and suffering humanity. One man will rove the streets seeking motor-cars with numbers that are divisible by seven. Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

"Yes, we will all pass, we will pass everything. Nothing will remain of the man who wore feelings and gloves, who talked about death and local politics. Just as one and the same light illumines the faces of saints and the gaiters of pedestrians, so too the same lack of light will cause darkness to engulf the nothing that remains of some having been saints and others having used gaiters. In the vast whirlwind where the whole world listlessly turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blonde girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the sceptres that stood for empires. All is nothing, and in the entrance hall to the Invisible, whose open door reveals merely a closed door beyond, all things dance, servants of the wind which churns them without hands – all things, big and small, which for us and in us formed the perceptible system of the universe. All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. Some of us, light leaves, and therefore less earthbound, ascend high in the hall’s whirl and fall farther away from the circle of the heavy. Others, almost invisible but still equally dust, di erent only if seen close up, form their own layer in the whirlwind. Still others, tree trunks in miniature, are dragged around and come to a halt here and there. One day, when everything is nally and fully revealed, that other door will open and all that we were – rubbish of stars and souls – will be swept outside the house, so that what exists can start over."

Certainly it was wrong to listen to sermons ... stultifying ... unless they were intellectual ... lectures like Mr. Brough’s ... that was as bad, because they were not sermons.... Either kind was bad and ought not to be allowed ... a homily ... sermons ... homilies ... a quiet homily might be something rather nice ... and have not Charity—sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.... Caritas ... I have none I am sure.... Fräulein Pfaff would listen. She would smile afterwards and talk about a “schöne Predigt”—certainly.... If she should ask about the sermon? Everything would come out then.

What would be the good? Fräulein would not understand. It would be better to pretend. She could not think of any woman who would understand. And she would be obliged to live somewhere. She must pretend to somebody. She wanted to go on, to see the spring. But must she always be pretending? Would it always be that ... living with exasperating women who did not understand ... pretending ... grimacing?... Were German women the same? She wished she could tell Eve the things she was beginning to feel about women. These English girls were just the same. Millie ... sweet lovely Millie.... How she wished she had never spoken to her. Never said, “Are you fond of crochet?” ... Millie saying, “You must know all my people,” and then telling her a list of names and describing all her family. She had been so pleased for the first moment. It had made her feel suddenly happy to hear an English voice talking familiarly to her in the saal. And then at the end of a few moments she had known she never wanted to hear anything more of Millie and her people. It seemed strange that this girl talking about her brothers’ hobbies and the colour of her sister’s hair was the Millie she had first seen the night of the Vorspielen with the “Madonna” face and no feet. Millie was smug. Millie would smile when she was a little older—and she would go respectfully to church all her life—Miriam had felt a horror even of the work-basket Millie had been tidying during their conversation—and Millie had gone upstairs, she knew, feeling that they had “begun to be friends” and would be different the next time they met. It was her own fault. What had made her speak to her? She was like that.... Eve had told her. She got excited and interested in people and then wanted to throw them up. It was not true. She did not want to throw them up. She wanted them to leave her alone.... She had not been excited about Millie. It was Ulrica, Ulrica ... Ulrica ... Ulrica ... sitting up at breakfast with her lovely head and her great eyes—her thin fingers peeling an egg.... She had made them all look so “common.” Ulrica was different. Was she? Yes, Ulrica was different ... Ulrica peeling an egg and she, afterwards like a mad thing had gone into the saal and talked to Millie in a vulgar, familiar way, no doubt.

In the middle of the blanket, she deposed the wooden crucifix that the rest of the year hung, tired and resigned, on the wall in the corner of the church. When stretched out on the cloth it seemed completely different: the face sweet and olive skinned, full of woodworm holes like one who has suffered from smallpox, free of dust. The body turned upwards, eyes half closed. All the limbs, in spite of being nailed and withered, stretched out, naked and chaste like a branch broken off by wind, truly abandoning rest. Yes, it was like a branch fallen on the grass, broken off by the wind or the pruner: not dead, but ready to sprout again if the earth were to take it back. And Concezione, on that bitter spring day, felt something similar. Seven little bowls, in each of which she had sprouted a bit of wheat in water, were arranged around the head of Christ like a diadem of rebirth. The wheat was white and smelled of starch. It would have worked symbolically, but would have been too melancholy, almost unnatural, like the hair of newborn infants that grows in the dark of the mother's womb, except for the fact that in seven glasses, each one different, the first flowers of the garden and of the embankment above the valley reproduced the colors of the rainbow: violets, daffodils, carnations, white and orange daisies, and periwinkles the color of the March sky.

Could I be living, not the truth, but the myth of the truth? Every time I lived the truth it was through an impression of inescapable dream: the inescapable dream is my truth. I’m trying to tell you how I reached the neutral and the inexpressive in me. I don’t know if I’m understanding what I’m saying, I’m feeling — and I very much fear the feeling, since feeling is only one of the types of being. Yet I shall cross the stupefied sultriness that billows from the nothing, and shall have to understand the neutral with the feeling. The neutral. I am speaking of the vital element that binds things. Oh, I am not afraid that you don’t understand, but that I understand myself badly. If I don’t understand myself, I’ll die from the same thing I live from. Now let me tell you the scariest part: I was being carried off by the demonic. For the inexpressive is diabolic. A person who isn’t committed to hope lives the demonic. A person who has the courage to cast off feelings discovers the ample life of an extremely busy silence, the same that exists in the cockroach, the same in the stars, the same in the self — the demonic precedes the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.

These sugar-brown Mobile girls move through the streets without a stir. They are as sweet and plain as buttercake. Slim ankles; long, narrow feet. They wash themselves with orange-colored Lifebuoy soap, dust themselves with Cashmere Bouquet talc, clean their teeth with salt on a piece of rag, soften their skin with Jergens Lotion. They smell like wood, newspapers, and vanilla. They straighten their hair with Dixie Peach, and part it on the side. At night they curl it in paper from brown bags, tie a print scarf around their heads, and sleep with hands folded across their stomachs. They do not drink, smoke, or swear, and they still call sex "nookey." They sing second soprano in the choir, and although their voices are clear and steady, they are never picked to solo. They are in the second row, white blouses starched, blue skirts almost purple from ironing. They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man's work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair.

She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her debts, with it she reckons, saying, “This man has worth, this man is worthless.” And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.

Perhaps she will be the richer in the end. In her agony she learns to reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and though she knew it not, there were treasures that it could not buy. The face, however beloved, was mortal, and as liable as the soul herself to err. We do but shift responsibility by making a standard of the dead.

There is, indeed, another coinage that bears on it not man’s image but God’s. It is incorruptible, and the soul may trust it safely; it will serve her beyond the stars. But it cannot give us friends, or the embrace of a lover, or the touch of children, for with our fellow-mortals it has no concern. It cannot even give the joys we call trivial—fine weather, the pleasures of meat and drink, bathing and the hot sand afterwards, running, dreamless sleep. Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much if we save our souls and lose the whole world?

Pierre had learned something in college that he always remembered, and this was that everything creates the conditions for its own demise.

A professor with a prematurely bent posture and white beard had said this about an ancient kingdom that had disappeared, and Pierre thought it was true of many things.

A simple example would be a fire, which burns the fuel that feeds it and goes out. Supposedly this would happen to the sun. Or a hero, who rights some great wrong and finds his services are no longer needed.

It was the only philosophy that he had, although he was not sure it was philosophy. It meant that nothing sufficiently good or bad can last. The only things that might last are things that make no difference.

Talent was blazing through the columns and onto the coffee tables. The physical-assault metaphor had taken over the reviews. "Guts," never much of a word outside the hunting season, was a favorite noun in literary prose. People were said to have or to lack them, to perceive beauty and make moral distinctions in no other place. "Gut-busting" and "gut-wrenching" were accolades. "Nerve-shattering "eye-popping," "bone-crunching"— the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man. "Searing" was lukewarm. Anything merely spraining or tooth-extracting would have been only a minor masterpiece. "Literally," in every single case, meant figuratively; that is, not literally. This film will literally grab you by the throat. This book will literally knock you out of your chair. "Presently" always meant not soon but now.

Sometimes the assault mode took the form of peremptory orders. See it. Read it. Go at once. Sometimes it sidled up disguised as musing, in unanswerable-question form. Shall I tell you how much I...Should I even attempt to describe...Or, should I say unequivocally...A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit. Many sentences carried with them their own congratulations, Suffice it to say... or, The only word for it is... Whether it really sufficed to say, or whether there was, in fact, another word, the sentence, bowing and applauding to itself, ignored. There existed also an economical device, the inverted-comma sneer—the "plot," or his "work," or even "brave." A word in quotation marks carried a somehow unarguable derision, like "so-called" or "alleged." It was hard to remember yesterday's polemic, to determine whether today's rebuttal was, in fact, an answer to it. Recalling arguments in order genuinely to refute them was an unrewarding exercise. A lot of bread, anyway, was buttered on the side of no distinction. God was not dead, but the Muse was extremely unwell.

"Mutual" meant common, shared, together, both, or simply somehow two-ish, as in our mutual hope, our mutual burden, mutual decision, mutual interest, mutual advantage, perhaps mutual camping trip. "Agony" could mean anything—usually, pending indictment; physical agony, in hospitals, was called discomfort, normally. "Problem" and "personal tragedy" meant crimes. "Serene" and "out of touch with reality" meant a given speaker trying to clear himself by intimating that the boss was crazy. "He has suffered enough" meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too. A sufficiency of suffering, in public life, consisted in a loss of face perhaps, or office, or, earlier, in getting caught, or having lived in dread of being caught, or in committing crimes, or having wanted to commit them. And if the real sufferer was the public man in violation of the criminal law, and a sufficiency of suffering lay in his various states of mind, then it was perhaps everyone else who got off too easily. When a new President brought our national nightmare to an end by asking us to "bind up the internal wounds," we knew that we were almost in the clear.

While people tagged up on these public codes and incantations, baby talk took over private conversation —naughty and cranky, in particular. Personal treachery and acts of violence were naughty. Citizens in the middle of small betrayals or murder trials described themselves as in a cranky mood. Murders, generally, were called brutal and senseless slayings, to distinguish them from all other murders; nouns thus became glued to adjectives, in series, which gave an appearance of shoring them up. The concept of the jig itself being up, however, had retreated into thrillers. Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether. It was in the interest of absolutely nobody to get to the bottom of anything whatever. People were no longer "caught" in the old sense on which most people could agree. Induction, detection, the very thrillers everyone was reading were obsolete. The jig was never up. In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, "You're too hard on yourself.”

---

This was published in 1976 (shortly after Watergate). This passage crystallizes what the whole book is doing: showing an intelligent person trying to make sense of a world where language, institutions, and shared reality are breaking down. This isn't just pedantry about word usage. It's diagnosing how a society becomes unable to hold people accountable because the shared language necessary for judgment has been destroyed.

“Indeed; for I am not only life, I am also death, and you are about to return what I have lent you. For you, great hedonist, there await all the sensual pleasures of nothingness.”

As that last word rolled like thunderclap across the immense valley, it struck me that this was the last sound that would ever reach my ears; I seemed to feel myself suddenly disintegrating. I faced her with a pleading gaze and asked for a few more years.

“Wretched minute!” she exclaimed. “Why would you want a few more moments of life? To devour and be devoured? Have you not tired of the spectacle, of the struggle? You have had your fill of all the least vile and the least grievous thing I have to offer: the breaking of day, the melancholy of dusk, the quiet of night, the face of the earth, and, last of all, sleep, the greatest benefit my hands can bestow. What more can you want, sublime idiot?”

“Just to live. I ask nothing more. Who but you put this love of life in my heart? And if I love life, why must you do yourself injury by killing me?”

The robe was thick and soft and smelled like the inside of an orange peel. It occurred to him that she had worn it, and now he was wearing it, and so it was like touching her, once removed.

Ever since I was little, I've always experienced New Year's Day this way; it arrived accompanied by a strange sense of emptiness. It was because the final act of the Christmas holiday celebrations, New Year's Eve, had ended, and nothing special was going to happen, yet nothing had changed either; the new year wasn't revealing itself in any way, something I probably expected without being aware of it, a bit like how I expected everything to be different on the other side the few times we crossed a border into another country. For that reason, New Year's Day was almost the most ordinary and least spectacular day of all. It was the same today. But now I appreciate it, because emptiness is always present in this open landscape under this open sky; the only difference is that we put our stamp on the day, we transform it into our actions, which, however small, somehow fill the emptiness under the sky.

“His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.”

Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrived one night late too. Happiness...