Cormac McCarthy | 1933-2023

Not since Faulkner has there been such a singularly unique and original voice in literature. He spent his days at the Santa Fe Institute learning the complexities of our universe, and keeping up with the latest discoveries and sciences. I like to point toward his particularly beautiful and endearing sections of the 2022 novel, The Passenger, regarding a transgender character to show how important it was to him to empathize with and understand the science behind how society changes and grows.

In Sutree from 1979 he wrote about death, “How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

I’m going to say goodbye with my favorite passage of his from the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”