“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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Hey, Cormac lives nearby. I’d love to meet him. But even my boss, who is a best selling author in his own right, has never met him. Apparently he’s a bit of a hermit, and avoids the public eye.
One of my favorite quotes is “Proof that God exists does.”
It’s ungrammatical, but it should have the interpretation “Proof that God exists does (exist)” just like “John will clap and Mary won’t (clap)” allows you to omit ‘clap’ and preserve its meaning.
Technically speaking, it’s because you aren’t allowed to delete under identity with something in a subject island. And although there is no real reason to have a prohibition like this, all languages have this particular one.
Anyway, I always found it super ironic that some universal natural law disallowed this sentence. Grammar is deep, man…
“The Road” is the most depressing book I’ve ever skimmed. I haven’t read “No Country for Old Men,” but the movie (which I hear hews closely to the book) is also quite depressing (but very, very, VERY good). I’d hate to be in McCarthy’s subconscious.
I read ‘The Road.’ All I call it is “That Damn Book.” An amazing piece of literature, but it could make Mary Poppins commit suicide.
“The Crossing” and “Blood Meridian” are way better, in this two-centers opinion:
“He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there.”
or,
“…war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and that of another within that larger will which because it binds them is forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always there. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way…Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.”
And no, The Road is not depressing–unless remembering the consequence of our lives is. McCarthy is SPECTACULAR reading for atheists, sceptics, and the like. I’ve pushed more paper for the man than a Lehman Brother’s banker the midnight of the expiration of his Faustian bargain. The man deserves your money! (Mostly because he probably just… gives it away)
I read The Road a few months ago and am currently trying to get through Blood Meridian. For those who have read other McCarthy books I have to ask: Do all his books feature dead fetuses in graphic scenes? Because The Road and Blood Meridian both do.
At least two people I know have said that Blood Meridian is the most violent book they’ve ever read.
@ Aubrey:
Yes, that is a motif in several of his books, if that’s the sort of thing you call a ‘motif’ (*cringe*). But the violence in his books isn’t meant to be indulgent. There’s a point to it if you can distance yourself a bit from the unremitting realness as McCarthy portrays it.
@ Elliot:
How bout ‘strange loops’?
“The following sentence is true: The prior sentence is false.”
In response to Ty’s first post: Dude you must have been pretty baked when you wrote that, lol
Nope, just a big Cormac fan who’d love to meet him in person.
@Jesse
My personal favorites are:
“The horse raced past the barn fell”
(Initially sounds terrible, but under the interpretation “There was a horse that was raced past the barn. That horse fell.” it’s fine) and
“Somebody somebody left left”
(Also terrible, until you realize “Person A left person B. Then person B left.”)
Both of them are perfectly grammatical sentences, but your brain has trouble parsing them.
I finished The Road last week, because, thanks to Fallout 3, I’ve been on a post apocalyptic kick. It was very powerful, but I did not find it depressing, nor did I find any part of it shocking. I may read it again, but currently do not have any great desire to do so. I am looking forward to the film version.
I’d like to read some of his other books now.
I read “All the Pretty Horses” years ago. From what I remember there are no dead feti.
Wait, my bad, my comment was in response to Elliott’s post.
The back of the book should say “A depressing glimpse of our future thanks to George Bush and Barak Obama, the harbingers of the New World Order.”
*The Road* and *Blood Meridian* are two entirely different animals, I’d say. Both are frakkin brilliant, and I loved them both. However, *The Road* is, for all its bleakness, a novel of enduring hope in our future, whereas *Blood Meridian* is a damnably clever meditation on death and meaning in the world.
As far as style is concerned, *The Road* compares well to *The Old Man and the Sea*, and *Blood Meridian* compares to *Written on the Body*. Both works feature quotable lines that are surpassing good, but the latter work features whole swaths of text you’ll want to quote at length whereas the former creates an atmosphere breathtaking in its frightening realization (all the more so because it is plausible as a future for our species).
I gladly recommend both works.
As for those who find *Blood Meridian* excessively violent, well, I’d suggest you never read either Michael Gira’s *The Consumer* or Lautréamont’s *Les Chants de Maldoror*, either of which will burn your eyes and throw cold water on your heart.
Who is this “marcion” crackhead? S/he is *clearly* filled with either superstitious woo or conspiracy theorist woo.
Both of them are perfectly grammatical sentences, but your brain has trouble parsing them.
That’s why we have commas and clause-indicating words (like ‘that’). :)
“Somebody somebody left, left.”
“The horse that raced past the barn fell.”
One of my English teachers liked this little puzzle:
Add punctuation so that the following makes sense:
Smith whereas Jones had had had had had had had had had had had the examiner’s approval.
What are the odds I mistyped that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo
Such an amazing and powerful book. You have to read it.
@ Elemenope
Punctuation helps, but not in the case of ‘Somebody somebody left left’ because modern standard English disallows separation of subject from predicate with a comma.
‘Somebody somebody left’ is the entire subject, so you actually can’t put the comma where you suggest.
One approach would be to change the embedded clause from a restrictional clause to a supplementary clause, which would allow you to use the relative pronoun ‘who,’ as well as offset the entire relative with two commas:
“Somebody, who somebody left, left”
But this changes the meaning slightly, because the relative no longer functions to identify a unique individual.
As for the second sentence, you are right to say that a good writer would avoid creating a “garden path” sentence like this by adding a ‘that’ to mark a subordinate clause boundary, but the complementizer ‘that’ is almost always optional.
“The horse I saw fell.”
“The horse that I saw fell.”
The point was that English allows you to generate “The horse raced past the barn fell” but it’s hard to decode it because your brain doesn’t wait to assign syntactic hierarchy — it does it as you are reading, and so there are cases where the reader can be lead astray.
Here’s a good one from the Wikipedia article on garden path sentences:
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
I’m a big post-apocalyptic fiction fan, but I didn’t really like the ending of The Road the first time I read it (although I enjoyed the book itself). However, after I had some time to reflect on it, and after watching No Country For Old Men, I finally “got it”. My problem was that I had never read any other Cormac McCarthy books, and I didn’t know going in that his writing style is all about nihilism transposed against hope. The Road, especially, is primarily an illustration of the lengths a father will go to in order to protect his child. Ultimately, when you think about it, the story ends up rather positive (given the unimaginably horrible circumstances they are in).
I now think The Road is one of the best books I’ve read. I’m really looking forward to the movie adaptation with Viggo Mortensen…if they ever get done with the post-production and release it. heh.
Also, Fallout 3 is one of the best games of all time ;)
I know God!
@Voice from the Wilderness Please tell him I said “hi”, and ask him why he never stops by anymore, or even calls or writes.
Hey Mike aka Monolith TMA
Haven’t you heard. God is everywhere at once so He is with you right now. You’re saying “But I can’t see Him.” Can you see the air. No but it is there none-the-less. He has been speaking through all that He created. The whole universe is His voice. And furthermore, He wrote you an entire book. You ought to check it out. He speaks very clearly there!
God Bless You
@Voice from the Wilderness
You mean the Bible? I’ve read it and taught it, did so quite frequently in my 20 years as a Christian.
@ Voice from the Wilderness
“You ought to check it out.”
I have, rather extensively. It hasn’t helped.
“He speaks very clearly there!”
Are you sure that we’re reading the same book — because I don’t get that impression?
I see contradictions, mixed narratives, omissions, confusion…not clarity.
Add in that if you read it as part of an overall study of history, you will find that it is filled with outright fabrications.
The Hebrews were prisoners in Egypt? Really? And no one else in the world noticed?
Ah, the God meme. The unifying sum of memes? The meme of memes? An un-meme-able meme? Personally I was enjoying the linguistics side rabble. Reminds me of a boring New Years party, when I got into a pointlessly circular debate about the flaws of “free market” economics, and ended up stirring all into a simian rage by systematically deconstructing the identity of a beer can. Its amazing the importance we place on the differentiation of names on the everyday level, when only a few extraneous notions from subatomic physics have contradicted that everything is merely contiguous substance. Me, you, us, them, mine yours–do they even exist outside their self-description? Who gives a ****. Live your life.
“Jeet?”
“Naw jew?”