“Is it not right that we who love one another, should be together?”

Love and proximity. This we must entangle in our grief. Love must survive even when the proximity of its source is lost. To take heart, means to preserve love. A preservation without proximity.

A desiring machine dreams of what it is. It cannot be otherwise. At bottom, at its core, a desiring machine is that which desires. You cannot go further than this. Desire is the start and the end. Every desire, the exultation that coincides with its creation, enjoining, and fulfillment, must, by necessity, be accompanied by its fear, its diminution, its lack. Every dream contains the seeds of its nightmare, but every nightmare can be turned back into a satisfying dream. We harness the power by letting go of the fear.

There is also the clay of nature, the world preformed and unmolded. Unto this landscape, we can fashion a world to conform to our true nature, either a utopia or a terra damnata.

It is unnecessary to point out that Cormac McCarthy is a great novelist. But he is also sometimes a challenging read. The same words difficult in written form take on a lyrical sensibility when spoken, a force capable of driving the narrative along. Take the following example:

“His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”

Read aloud, not a single word is out of place, or unnecessary. It is perfectly rendered to draw out the rhythmic, innate melody. This is a musical composition, prose at its best. But logically, syntactically, we can easily see a rogue editor taking a hatchet to the sentence according to some arbitrary laws of grammar. Spoken or read? It is strange standard but perhaps valid for a certain class of novelist. A great writer, yes, but an even better orator.

Or take another example:

“Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of deer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks.”

Unpacking the various elements tasks the mind, but the ear takes great pleasure in the flow of the lyrical prose. Can music easily accomplish what reason struggles to hold in a single picture frame? Reason slows us down, forces us to frame the composite shot. But reality is never a composite (this is the first mistake of reason). The second mistake is to prioritize virtuality at the expense of actuality, assuming that we always live just outside the reach of time, late, a habitually unreliable existence that always misses the exact moment of its incision. The ear, by contrast, has the power to speed it up, syncing the writing and the story to the natural flow of time, to our single shared duration.

Desire not what lies in the heart of another; desire only that you give love.

Yearn not for the ache that stirs inside a loved one’s bosom. Have faith that you ache for the same things.

“Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.”

“Indeed, does such a way of waking from a dream exist? I suppose a fish may well drown in air by falling in reverse, upward, toward the sky. The danger of death is the same. It’s the same as a fall on land, and one of necessity awakens from the dream.” – Kōbō Abe