Trigger warning slash navel-gazing alert: quote from Blood Meridien, plus essay-length rumination on empathy.
Cormac McCarthy's writing is insanely good; in this book, it's a dance with the violence he describes. This is the last line of the chapter describing the first Comanche attack:
"Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
On empathy... Two years ago I wouldn't have been able to read this book, and definitely wouldn't have relished it. Something has happened to my empathy. It's... broken, somehow. Or fixed? Dulled, anyway, like it's grown a callous.
Honestly I've been concerned about it. I have always been painfully empathetic. Witnessing an animal in pain or fear can affect me for years. And while I'm not stepping on scorpions or wasps yet, I stood and watched Chuck shoot a raccoon in a trap, and its death throes, and Clea worrying the carcass with her teeth, and walked away somber but not wrecked.
It occurred to me today that not being paralyzed by empathy is not such a bad thing, maybe even a positive thing. Hopefully it's a pendulum swing, and in the next iteration I'll still have the deep empathy but not the lasting horror that sometimes accompanies it. It's a double-edged sword (sorry cliche) but it's a big part of what has made me me and I would hate to lose it entirely.
Anyway. If you've made it this far, thanks for listening. And it's a good book. Not for everyone.
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