Where do I start?
I’m reading a lot again. Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, Milan Kundera, David Foster Wallace. I am so hungry for words. I want to read ten books at once but it’s impossible. But I’m impatient about getting blown away by a good book.
TV bulletin. I think The Bear is exceptionally well-written. It makes me want to talk to Christopher Storer, understand how he created it. But watching yet another interview of Cormac McCarthy or Donna Tartt, not easy to find at all BTW because they are both rather reclusive, I am reminded of the futility of trying to get to know a writer. My basic curiosity compels me to ask, who wrote this masterpiece? Please come out and explain yourself to me?? But knowing the details of their life or even how they created the work doesn’t add anything to my experience of their art. It adds no depth, no pathos, no transcendental understanding. Maybe every artist’s work must be complete on its own.
Anyway, Cormac McCarthy:
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― from “Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West”
And song of the day: Let Down by Radiohead. Heard on The Bear.
The second paragraph here is so relatable to me. I found myself nodding as I read along. What does it mean, after all, to understand the creative act that leads to anything creative (?). I don’t really know but I wish it could be analyzed/repeated/understandable. But like you point out, knowing anything about the creation doesn’t actually make it “understandable”…still trying to come to terms with that.
On Cormac McCarthy — the passage you selected reminds me of the infamous last paragraph of “The Road” somehow. Lovely and delicate but forceful somehow.