[HN Gopher] Cormac McCarthy's personal library
___________________________________________________________________
Cormac McCarthy's personal library
Author : bigflern
Score : 264 points
Date : 2025-10-01 23:06 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| lomase wrote:
| The Road is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.
|
| I could not stop reading it, but at the same time I hated how it
| made me feel. I stoped reading novels for years after finishing
| it.
| octygen wrote:
| The Road is my favorite fathering book ever. I have recommended
| it to all my dad friends. Audiobook is excellent too.
| thombles wrote:
| I gifted it to a couple of new Dad friends. They never did
| get back to me about it. Fair.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I can see why, but as a new father the last thing I want my
| fatherhood associated with is that horrible horrible story.
| elephant81 wrote:
| I've read it twice. Once as a naive 16-year-old. Once, as a
| young father. Profoundly upsetting the second time.
| Cruncharoo wrote:
| I'd also suggest Siddhartha for this. Having read it at
| different points of my life makes it uniquely special.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| I read The Road long before I became a father and part of me
| is, I guess, afraid to read it again now that I have two kids
| --perhaps because I remember how devastating it was then and
| suspecting it would be 100x that now. But I do intend to
| reread it sooner or later.
| dzuc wrote:
| The only book I've ever read in a single sitting.
| groos wrote:
| After reading the Road, I started on Blood Meridian and could
| not continue, swearing never to read McCarthy again. The
| man's soul was just too dark.
| username223 wrote:
| If you think "Blood Meridian" is dark, try "Child of God."
| I'm a huge McCarthy fan, but "Blood Meridian" is tough to
| appreciate. "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," and "All
| the Pretty Horses" are his most readable works; try them,
| then decide how much farther you want to go.
| cgh wrote:
| Child of God and The Crossing are two of my favourites by
| him.
| f30e3dfed1c9 wrote:
| I think Blood Meridian is his best book by far. The first
| time I read it, when I got to the end, I didn't even get
| up from my chair, just went right back to the beginning
| and started reading it again.
|
| I also like the border trilogy: All the Pretty Horses,
| The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Sort of
| surprisingly, never actually read No Country for Old Men
| although I've seen the movie three or four times.
|
| I think The Road is overrated.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Yes. There's something cruel there, or perhaps simply
| resigned, to reflecting the most brutal aspects of humanity
| in their most casual, logical, and inherent expression ([0]
| spoiler).
|
| You certainly never shake the feeling that something
| terrible is going to happen at any moment.
|
| I have read _The Road_ and _All the Pretty Horses_. I won't
| read any of the others. AtPH has less horror than _The
| Road_ , for what it's worth. It's very much a
| bildungsroman.
|
| If you enjoyed the road and want more like that, but
| without the horror; I'd say try our Steinbeck if you
| haven't. He's a greater writer, and less cruel.
|
| [0] AtPH spoiler: For example mangling that boy's feet.
| It's not arbitrary, not entirely necessary, but it had a
| logic to it; and is exactly the type of thing people do to
| each other.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| It's the only book I've read where I came upon a passage that
| literally caused my jaw to drop.
| blast wrote:
| Do you remember which one?
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| Yes.
| blast wrote:
| Which passage was it?
| elephant81 wrote:
| Babies in the tree?
| ttshaw1 wrote:
| That's Blood Meridian
| ycombinete wrote:
| It is most certainly the feed-people in the basement scene.
| I felt dizzy after reading that.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| >hated how it made me feel
|
| I sometimes don't like feeling either.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "McCarthy's detractors, meanwhile, found his writing overly
| mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him of
| relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly."
|
| Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something.
|
| I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I
| have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might
| write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin
| Tarantino as a filmmaker for the same reason.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Depiction isn't endorsement
| tolerance wrote:
| My impression is that Tarantino and McCarthy author with
| different motives in mind.
| justupvoting wrote:
| I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had
| an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.
|
| The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is
| violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the
| setting.
|
| Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac
| tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty)
| is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The
| statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it
| an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art.
| You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the
| mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't
| seem to care for that approach.
|
| I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the
| thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd
| suggest you give him another go.
|
| I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too
| distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly
| optimistic book.
|
| As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I think it's a stretch to call The Road optimistic.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| It's quite a stretch.
| justupvoting wrote:
| I don't think so; preserving goodness and decency comes
| at little personal cost to most of us, but McCarthy's
| effort in the book is at its core a depiction of these
| things surviving even the apocalypse, and at an
| incredible cost.
|
| That fire they carry is _not extinguished_ even in a
| world where all systems and pretenses at civilization
| have been ruined. It finds the wider flame, and decent
| folks to tend it.
|
| It is one of the more optimistic works he's done, not
| despite the setting, but because.
| bexsella wrote:
| I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic
| despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father
| wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with
| the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and
| worse, there are people who are good, and whose
| surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be
| good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an
| incredibly optimistic sentiment.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| The ending is definitely the most optimistic part of the
| book, but on balance I think the overall picture is still
| excruciatingly bleak. It gives me the impression that any
| optimism of the part of the characters is likely
| unwarranted. They're still doomed.
| justupvoting wrote:
| The point is that everyone is doomed (even if you imagine
| we can survive the civilization-murdering tools we've
| cobbled up, we can't outrun physics), but that _even at
| our most vulnerable_ , since the book occurs during a
| period directly after Armageddon, it is possible for some
| goodness in us to persist.
|
| I don't want to spoil, but the optimism isn't for the
| characters, it's for we the reader, and the species.
|
| The thimble of fire joins the wider flame. Goodness
| survives even there, and even then.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| How is overly masculine a bad thing? Makes me want to read it
| even more.
| lomase wrote:
| Just read it and you will find out. Is a really short book.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Oh I have read almost all of McCarthy's novels including
| this one. That's beside the point though, what's wrong
| about something being overtly masculine?
| mirabilis wrote:
| I'm not certain it's the case for McCarthy's works, but I
| think inept attempts at manly men could certainly veer
| into accidental parody. An "overly masculine" character
| might just bring Johnny Bravo to mind. To offer an
| example, I tried watching "Untamed" recently and the
| highly concentrated gruff machismo coming off of that
| main character mostly had me wondering if he would ever
| do or say anything that wasn't so cliche as to be
| scripted by predictive text. (Maybe it gets better, but
| the first few episodes did not hold me.)
| cma wrote:
| Parent comment says overly masculine rather than overtly
| masculine. Overly anything as a subjective judgment is
| usually defined as a bad thing. The question instead is
| why does op think it pushes into overly.
| komali2 wrote:
| It could be clownish and a caricature. I enjoyed The Road but
| it makes me think of a critique of sci fi I read once,
| wherein masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering
| problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones. Some
| books tackled this by demonstrating the presumptive and
| flawed approach sci fi writers take to biospheres / space
| stations / generation ships for example (Voyage from
| Yesteryear, A Half Built Garden) where despite all the
| engineering, the biosphere suffers. I suppose a part of why
| Dune made such waves was that it took a very human and
| ecological perspective front and center.
|
| The Road could be seen as overly masculine in its portrayal
| of a man and his son against nearly the entire world, which
| is often the fantasy of male prepper types. Some oppositional
| takes to this would be e.g. Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red
| Death, where he presents the dichotomy directly in a post-
| apocalypse world and argues for the more optimistic outcome,
| wherein people work together in a non-exclusionary way to
| overcome whatever the apocalyptic scenario is, which might be
| considered a more feminine perspective. Others taking that
| perspective would include Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built
| in Hell."
|
| In the Too Like Lightning series, Ada Palmer takes on the
| male/feminine sci fi angle directly by creating a near-
| utopian society of mostly gender neutral people. At one point
| in the novel a character argues that in fact they've created
| a feminine society of women, and therefore aren't prepared to
| handle the outlier class of people that want to create war,
| who have for the most part began to present explicitly as
| men.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| > masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering
| problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones
|
| I'd say the Road is a full inversion of this in that it
| doesn't bother explaining why the world collapsed and
| purely focuses on how people are left to cope with it
|
| It's a world where femininity and fertility have been
| completely eradicated and turned into a living hell by said
| survivalist men who vie to dominate what little is
| remaining
|
| The only "good" to be found in it is the memory of the
| Man's wife and the family the child meets at its conclusion
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| No kidding. Try to find an "overly masculine" book among
| Pulizer or Hugo nominees today. And people feign to wonder
| where the male readers have gone.
| burkaman wrote:
| Don't really understand this comment, I'm looking at the
| latest Pulitzer and Hugo winners and seeing what sound like
| pretty classic masculine tropes. James is about a man who
| escapes from slavery, fends for himself in the wilderness,
| violently avenges his wife and daughter, etc. Alien Clay is
| about a man who rebels against an evil government, is sent
| to a prison camp in space, bangs his boss (a woman), starts
| another rebellion, etc. I haven't read these books so maybe
| the descriptions are misleading, but I don't feel like I'm
| having any trouble finding masculinity here.
|
| On the other hand I (a man) have read Blood Meridian, and
| while I loved it, anyone who reads it and thinks "fuck yeah
| these are real men" is a psycopath. Nobody should want to
| be associated with those characters (or the real people
| that inspired them) in any way.
|
| > people feign to wonder where the male readers have gone
|
| I haven't heard this concern, but if this is an issue I
| can't really believe awards have anything to do with it.
| Nobody is saying "yeah I used to like books but Hugo
| nominees these last few years weren't to my taste, so I
| just stopped reading". At least in my experience the
| average person doesn't really care about media awards, they
| are mostly for industry insiders and a small subset of
| major enthusiasts.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > if this is an issue I can't really believe awards have
| anything to do with it
|
| That wasn't what I intended to convey. They're altogether
| not published to the same degree they were.
|
| > I haven't heard this concern
|
| do a search
|
| > I don't feel like I'm having any trouble finding
| masculinity here.
|
| What were the exact words I used? They're right there.
| Read them again.
| burkaman wrote:
| You're right, I guess "overly masculine" is the core of
| what I didn't understand. I don't know what that means,
| and while I can imagine someone being disappointed if
| they couldn't find any books with masculine characters
| and themes (which I think we agree are not hard to find,
| even among award nominees), I can't imagine someone
| finding those but thinking "but these aren't overly
| masculine, that's what I want". If you have some examples
| other than Cormac McCarthy books I think it would help
| explain the concept.
| scarmig wrote:
| Haven't read any of those Nebula/Hugo books, but there
| are shifts in style and emphasis that are very indicative
| of the author's gender. Not at all universal, but given a
| thousand words of writing, I bet I could identify the
| author's gender at 80% accuracy.
|
| Interiority being a huge axis here.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| Very common modern disease to associate a description of
| something with approval of its existence
|
| Loathing the inevitability of McCarthy to get the same
| posthumous treatment as Kerouac did and with those
| benevolent and corrective blows kill pure art just a
| little bit more
| dyauspitr wrote:
| There really aren't that many books with genuinely
| masculine men. I haven't read the ones you brought up,
| but usually it's not the specific events in the story
| that matter- it's more about the overall vibe, the way
| the character carries himself. And a lot of the time,
| that's where the sense of masculinity just doesn't come
| through anymore, at least not in any way a young boy
| could look up to.
| jonahx wrote:
| You don't have to love them, but dismissing two of the 20th
| century's great artists in their respective mediums while
| having a blog named "engineersneedart" is certainly ironic.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't see the irony or any conflict. I just don't celebrate
| the worst in humanity and have no desire to see it in art
| either. Perhaps I think the world is dark enough and that the
| better art inspires and can lift us.
|
| I don't "love" either artist to be sure. Is that also
| dismissive? I'm not sure.
| lunatuna wrote:
| I've only read The Road and found it extremely difficult
| because of the nihilism. I put it down in the middle of it and
| stewed for 6 months before I picked it up again. I am so glad I
| did. I think his detractors are right, it is violent,
| nihilistic, masculine and whatever else. Through that the other
| side of the contrast becomes so vivid. Maybe there are better
| ways to get there. For me it hit.
|
| My daughter and I talk about the message in the book regularly.
| Though she has yet to read it. I see more clearly my purpose as
| a dad and as a member in my community. Totally worth the read.
| tehnub wrote:
| It sounds like the book itself isn't nihilistic but there may
| be nihilistic characters in it, which doesn't seem like
| something worth criticizing it over.
| blast wrote:
| How do you tell that a book with nihilistic characters
| isn't a nihilistic book? The difference is obvious in
| principle, but I'm not sure it is in practice.
| justupvoting wrote:
| I can't think of a single character in the book for whom
| nihilism is their defining trait, and certainly not the
| primary characters. The effort to preserve goodness in
| the world only really matters when it's hard, when it
| comes at cost. The book turns that up to 11, but that is
| why it is hopeful.
|
| If you want to read McCarthy doing nihilism, maybe try
| the sunset limited.
|
| "You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then
| one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It
| doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in
| your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do
| about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead
| of you. And finally there is only one door left."
| philipallstar wrote:
| > I think his detractors are right, it is violent,
| nihilistic, masculine and whatever else.
|
| Thinking masculine is a criticism is quite a tell.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think the toxic kind probably does deserve criticism.
| mirabilis wrote:
| Haven't read "The Road" yet, but I was able to take the time to
| read "Blood Meridian" this year-- I don't think I would
| describe the violence depicted as "relished." It came across as
| vivid in an arduous, can't-look-away-from-the-wreckage-so-bear-
| witness way, and I was really intrigued by how the Kid's POV
| dissolves during the worst of it. And about "why someone might
| write about the worst among us"--the glory-seeking and
| hypocrisy of the Glanton gang also felt timely, to be frank.
| So, to me, it felt more like a clinical exposure of ugly rot
| rather than a luridly violent power fantasy like Inglorious
| Basterds.
|
| Though I do kinda feel the "masculine" note in that quote haha,
| if only because the women that appeared in the story were
| steadfastly hospitable (or victims.) Disregarding any incident
| where the Judge was involved, it actually felt quaint,
| especially in contrast to everything else going on.
|
| I'll be interested as I check out the rest of his catalogue as
| to if the stomach-churning detail involved still feels
| necessary, or if my tolerance starts to change.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| Yeah it's hard to say he's "relishing" violence when he a
| very well-researched depiction of complete horrific and
| genocidal chapter of the Manifest Destiny period that was
| essentially forgotten.
|
| I see the violence as a refutation of the idealized,
| sanitized version of the West popularized in mainstream
| Westerns. Where law and authority = good, even though the
| Glanton gang was funded and armed by US authorities
| justupvoting wrote:
| I think McCarthy is one of the greatest American writers, but
| I will say my two main gripes with him are his tendency to
| drift over the line into overwrought (sometimes the biblical
| language is incredibly powerful, sometimes not), and his
| utter inability to write women.
|
| He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even
| there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care
| about reality"? Hmm, ok?
|
| "His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.
|
| But no writer is flawless.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Watched a video essay yesterday by a female reader who
| found the Aunt's four page monologue in 'All the Pretty
| Horses' one of the most insightful and moving explanations
| of women she'd ever read.
|
| She was particularly surprised to find such a passage in a
| book by McCarthy who she expected to be some gruff man's
| man.
|
| I haven't read that passage myself, but seemingly Cormac
| was capable of writing women when he chose to. Perhaps not
| enough, though.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I've always gotten the sense from McCarthy that he was keenly
| aware that civilization is not just something to take for
| granted and that there is always something dangerous at the
| edges that needs to be carefully guarded against.
| sharkweek wrote:
| 100%
|
| His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are
| extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and
| we're hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often
| covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral
| compass might look like.
|
| Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Instead, in my world-view most humans want to be kind. (And
| I don't carry a gun everywhere like McCarthy either, ha
| ha.)
| internet_points wrote:
| > He said that things would get better.
|
| > The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of
| his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they caint get no
| worse, he said.
|
| > But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can
| always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so.
| username223 wrote:
| "Child of God?" You started at just about the darkest, least
| approachable place. Try "No Country for Old Men" or "All the
| Pretty Horses," both of which are far easier to read and
| contemplate.
| brennanpeterson wrote:
| Or The Crossing, which, at least for the first third is his
| sparest and best writing. At least, I prefer the marriage of
| the gothic sensibility and poetry with the classic western.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| The first third ripped my heart out
| nylonstrung wrote:
| All the Pretty Horses has much of the bleakness that
| characterizes his stories but also genuinely beauty and
| romanticism that he pulls off equally well
|
| Love it
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I have a theory that everyone has a different level of
| detachment vs self-insertion when consuming a fictional
| narrative. Those more self-insertive probably shouldn't read
| his books.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's a media literacy issue. It's good to read challenging
| works to grow your understanding. I think the self-insertive
| tendency comes from consuming works oriented toward it with
| typical hero/villain structures
| lubesGordi wrote:
| I think its just a simple matter of aesthetics. Some people
| find violence ugly, and don't like looking at it. Some people
| think that by looking at it you're somehow coming to a
| greater understanding of the world or something. Maybe that
| is the case for some super sheltered individuals, but I doubt
| it's the case on the whole.
|
| If anyone has any ideas on what the point of violence in art
| is, I'm open to hearing it. Obviously horror is a genre and
| so is gore, and people seem to enjoy being shocked. I don't
| think that is what McCarthy was going for though. And he
| wasn't going for the vengeance-catharsis angle like Tarantino
| either.
| currymj wrote:
| If you read his last two novels he was clearly well-informed
| about mathematics.
|
| However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all
| the material in the math books mentioned here, I think the
| reporter may be a little too credulous about that. I suspect he
| had the very common experience of buying a yellow book and being
| defeated in the first couple chapters.
| scarmig wrote:
| That might be an understatement of his capabilities, though
| obviously he wasn't a professional mathematician. It's a joy to
| read some of the eulogies professors at the Santa Fe Institute
| gave to him:
|
| https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/memoriam-cormac-mcc...
|
| > He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and a memory to
| match. Topics ranged from salvage diving -- something we
| discussed a few days ago -- to far more academic fare often
| focused on mathematics and physics.
|
| > Cormac and I engaged on a wide range of topics. Some
| recurring themes included social mobility, machine
| intelligence, the intersection of genius and madness, and cars
| and trucks.
|
| > Cormac also often remarked that a lively conversation with
| friends is about as good as sex. He'd talk for hours about
| physics, math, novels, philosophy, human nature, bawdy humor,
| corny humor, architecture (including detailed advice on my own
| house), gambling, history, and any question that lacked a quick
| and obvious answer.
|
| Etc.
| cols wrote:
| Thanks very much for posting this link. The eulogies were
| indeed a pleasure to read. Choked up a few times.
| noosphr wrote:
| > His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments,
|
| I'm not saying that he did, but this along with being the right
| age to have read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
| strongly suggest that he used that book to grasp a lot more of
| his books than most people can.
|
| That book gives you a very good strategy for reading books that
| are beyond you normally. In the three years since I've read it
| I've managed to finish books that I couldn't read even when I
| was doing my PhD and it was my full time job to understand
| them.
|
| The funny thing is that I only ran into that book when I was
| trying to figure out how to build knowledge graphs for complex
| documents using LLMs. Using multiple readings to create a
| summary of each chunk, then a graph of the connections between
| the chunks, then a glossary of all the terms and finally a
| critique of each chunk gave better than sota results for the
| documents I was working on.
| chompychop wrote:
| Where can I read more about your research? Knowledge graphs
| interest me.
| noosphr wrote:
| Drop me a line on my profiles email.
|
| I'm playing around with using hyperlinks in pdfs to get
| around how much the www sucks for posting serious research
| with serious working code.
|
| Caveat emptor: I'm first working on getting the basic
| groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to
| do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can
| actually get text out of.
| posterguy wrote:
| I'm curious why you think that "strongly suggests" anything?
| voidhorse wrote:
| > However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master
| all the material in the math books mentioned here
|
| Why? And what exactly would mastery look like? Regardless,
| McCarthy didn't make his mark as a mathematician so his private
| ability to understand doesn't matter. Why take the opportunity
| to make a negative assumption and diminish the possibility that
| he had mastered an understanding in his private life? What does
| this accomplish? Seems like the only thing it could possibly do
| is to try and make you and me feel better about our own
| inadequacies, without proof.
| ChanningAllen wrote:
| This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac
| McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light
| on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.
|
| I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an
| insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:
|
| > Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without
| my knowledge exists without my consent.
|
| Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes."
| Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| I think that's an allusion to the Gnostic demiurge.
| metadat wrote:
| For the uninitiated (like me!):
|
| TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god".
| E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."
|
| _> In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who
| fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of
| the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable
| God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes
| malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world
| and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans.
| Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to
| the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to
| return to the true, good God. _
|
| See also: https://gnosticismexplained.org/the-gnostic-
| demiurge/
| 47282847 wrote:
| The allegorical parents and the internalized judge to
| overcome.
| reedlaw wrote:
| Not an Old Testament reference, but a Gnostic belief. 1
| John addresses Gnosticism by refuting some of its claims
| such as Jesus only appearing to be human. While John
| doesn't reference the Demiurge, the concept goes hand in
| hand with this Gnostic teaching that Jesus was a pure
| spiritual being. Gnostics considered material things evil,
| so Jesus coming in the flesh and a benevolent creator God
| did not fit their worldview.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| If you want to learn more about the demiurge, this guy
| provides a good simple explanation and puts it in context.
| Without ever mentioning gnosticism, by the way.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgGfQdv_rPc
| ixaxaar wrote:
| Or maybe he was searching for "structure", the way
| Grothendieck was - in pure math, in systems biology, in
| complex networks (e.g. civilizations, culture, occult) and in
| individual behaviors
| layman51 wrote:
| I hope that wasn't Cormac McCarthy's stand-in because the Judge
| character is like some type of supernatural violent being.
| aloha2436 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be a direct stand-in. It's mentioned in
| the article that people suspect McCarthy of reveling in the
| violence in his novels. Whether he does or does not he would
| certainly have been aware of that perception. Judge Holden as
| a character embodies many distasteful qualities of mankind,
| it would make sense that the qualities he embodies the most
| distinctly are the ones McCarthy sees in himself.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| The only "self-insert" he's done is the main character of
| Suttree which is semi-autobiographical
|
| The judge is an incarnation of evil and a pedophile so I
| don't think that's his Mary sue
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45383439
| ndneighbor wrote:
| Slight tangent brought up by the article, but usually the greats
| aren't good at just one thing but have a combination of
| eccentricities that form the person. I find it heartening that
| Cormac had these in spades.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Great article. Reading it, I was expecting the author to come
| across a little sled labeled "Rosebud" every next sentence.
| gandalfstoe wrote:
| Eek, accumulating, curating, memorializing misses the point he
| made.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > the point
|
| Just the one?
| dcchambers wrote:
| Incredible article. Thanks for sharing.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| > They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By
| comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book
| collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.
|
| Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large
| personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the
| lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The
| person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned
| 300,000 books.
| idoubtit wrote:
| Among the famous writers that I know through their writings,
| I'd expect Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco to have read many
| thousands of books, because that wide culture was a major
| element of their fictions. The later did have 50,000 books at
| home, but the former became blind and probably didn't own many
| books.
|
| With simple math, reading 2 books each week leads to at most
| 7,000 over a lifetime. If Denny McCarthy's guess is right (read
| 85% of 20k), his older brother read about 4 to 5 books a week,
| every week, from teenager to his old age.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Funny that you bring up Borges and Eco. Eco when commenting
| on his library, I can't remember if in an essay or lecture,
| referred to it as an 'anti-library', pointing out that one of
| the most important skills a reader can possess is to be able
| to talk about books one hasn't read. As in Borges _Library of
| Babel_ most people will be doomed to only read very little of
| what is in existence.
|
| He thought his huge library should be taken as a research
| tool and sign of 'conscious ignorance' of the vast things you
| don't know, rather than taking a consumer mindset to it,
| which you see a lot of people do when they brag about how
| many books they've read.
| athpythoncoder wrote:
| It's really difficult to find any/many of these titles in English
| or German in Germany.
| max_ wrote:
| I just watched "The Road" yesterday night.
|
| Good movie.
| random_moonwalk wrote:
| Are there any collections of annotated pages from books belonging
| to well-known authors that have been made available online? I'd
| be interested to get some impression of how they engaged with the
| material, whatever it is.
| lourendotco wrote:
| you could start here https://archive.ph/M2H3s here you can find
| an archive of hannah arendt's marginalia and annotations
| https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hapl_marginalia_all/
| random_moonwalk wrote:
| Thanks, these are great! A link to some scans of David Foster
| Wallace's annotations in the New Yorker piece too. For the
| curious: https://archive.ph/o/M2H3s/www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/
| releases...
| ryanar wrote:
| Fascinating article. As I was reading it, particularly the part
| about his son John saying his father was very loving and was
| there for him, but also saying he did not like to be interrupted
| during his work or reading, and would say "Go away! I am
| reading!" immediately made me think he was quite narcissistic.
| His work was more important than even his own son. Later on his
| brother Dennis confirmed my suspicions that McCarthy was a
| narcissist. I have an insatiable curiosity as well and truly love
| learning, but in being a christian I have actively worked against
| my tendency to narcissism. A life like McCarthys sounds
| romantically fabulous, but when you think about the end of it,
| four people around your bed, it sounds tragic. There is something
| profound in sacrificially loving others and it doesn't seem like
| Cormac experienced that. Though I am sure his wives, brother
| Dennis, and son John, did.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with having boundaries. Anyways, the
| quote goes on:
|
| "But he was a great father, always there for me, and I learned
| so much from him. We would have these long conversations about
| science and history and music, and whatever else, and he was
| the funniest person I've ever met, just a natural comedian." "
| f30e3dfed1c9 wrote:
| What's wrong with dying with four people around your bed? Do
| you think that's too few or something?
| polytely wrote:
| Thanks for posting, he was a really interesting guy.
|
| This is my favourite interview with him so I will take this post
| as an excuse to share it.
|
| https://youtu.be/HrUy1Vn2KdI
| pwillia7 wrote:
| > "I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the
| first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town
| somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But
| the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I
| was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin
| through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was
| snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never
| said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped
| around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen
| he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I
| could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color
| of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead
| and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all
| that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there
| he would be there. And then I woke up."
| jermberj wrote:
| Gets me every time.
| shawndrost wrote:
| I have loved Cormac's books since I was a child, but never read
| Larry McMurtry until recently. If you're in the same boat, I
| implore you to give one of the below a try.
|
| Lonesome Dove -- A great story about washed-up Texas Rangers with
| achingly beautiful writing.
|
| The Last Picture Show -- More tonally similar to Cormac's
| stories. Coming of age in a dusty Texas town.
|
| Leaving Cheyenne -- I have never in my life recommended a romance
| novel until this moment. I'm literally crying as I write this,
| remembering the closing scene.
| scarmig wrote:
| If the revisionist Western appeals to you, I'd also recommend
| Oakley Hall's Warlock.
| k3lsi3r wrote:
| Initially thought you may have meant revisionist as a slight,
| but I see that it's a sub-genre. For anyone else unfamiliar
| (from wikipedia):
|
| > The revisionist Western is a sub-genre of the Western
| fiction. Called a post-classical variation of the traditional
| Western, the revisionist subverts the myth and romance of the
| traditional by means of character development and realism to
| present a less simplistic view of life in the "Old West".
| While the traditional Western always embodies a clear
| boundary between good and evil, the revisionist Western does
| not.
| gaws wrote:
| It would be great if the researchers uploaded a text catalog of
| the archive.
| t_serpico wrote:
| The answer stems from McCarthy's deeply disparaging view of
| modern society, which he considered lost, divorced from nature,
| history and tradition and heading toward social collapse and
| apocalypse. "Cormac considered contemporary fiction a waste of
| time," said Dennis, "because contemporary writers no longer have
| a legitimate culture to feed their souls."
| vittore wrote:
| Just listened to Broken Record episode and learned Cormac
| McCarthy had black Ferrari. Opened HN and we talk about his
| personal library. Time to read No Country For Old Man I guess.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Someone who enjoys this please enlighten me or show me a way into
| McCarthy's prose using examples of what's good. I tried several
| times to read his novels and I'm sorry, but it's just terrible.
| It's hard to put my finger on what is so unappealing. The closest
| I can come to what is bad about it is that it reads like farce
| without humor (if you take 'farce' to be a question of tempo, as
| in "tragedy sped up"). The opening to Blood Meridian (his
| masterpiece, I'm told) is just this endless stream of backstory
| that The Kid is supposed to have done or been but no exposition
| of anything. It sounds like the imagination of a 13yo boy playing
| with his GI Joes or super heroes. The fragmentary style and
| purply-pulpish register is very hard to take seriously. Where's
| the beef? Please post some passages that don't sound like common
| pulp fiction, unless that's what people are crowing about, in
| which case...I got nothin'.
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