Pure blue in the dawn

Robert Macfarlane on Twitter, three days ago:

Ah…Cormac McCarthy has died today. A giant of a writer, who wrote with a pen of iron, torqued language into new forms & worked the rhythms of prose into wire-flashes of lightning & great rolls of thunder. Favourite lines, passages? This from Blood Meridian will stay with me:

A few responded to the invitation with other descriptions of landscape, like the stunning final paragraph of The Road. 

Another quoted this, from Blood Meridian, although the author of a Washington Post piece on McCarthy felt the writing here went 'past feverish to become nearly comical'.

 

Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post on Blood Meridian that quoted several beautiful passages describing a bloody journey made by the scalphunters ('they rode through the long twilight and the sun set and no moon rose and to the west the mountains shuddered again and again in clattering frames and burned to final darkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land'.) This writing, ignored at the time and subsequently acclaimed, is now studied by academics in books like Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes (2016). I'll conclude here with Ted Goia's words on McCarthy's landscape descriptions and another quote from Blood Meridian.

Just as a librarian throwing a dart at the text of The Sun Also Rises will inevitably strike upon an account of eating or drinking, or doing the same with Updike will encounter some creative variant on copulation, the same technique applied to the world of Blood Meridian will doubtless intersect a description of prairie or desert or hill country. A typical McCarthy passage: “They rode all day upon a pale gastine sparsely grown with saltbush and panicgrass. In the evening they entrained upon a hollow ground that rang so roundly under the horses’ hooves that they stepped and sidled and rolled their eyes like circus animals. . . . On the day following they crossed a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies left no trace upon it.” The characters of his books both haunt these landscapes and are haunted by them in turn.