A few months ago I was slogging through Blood Meridian, and about 3/4 of the way through, Cormac McCarthy writes:
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it from birth and thereby bled it of all 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 muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
There are things against which I know I should not measure myself. I imagine McCarthy’s prose is high on that list. I haven’t thought of anything compelling to write here since I read those lines, though it may comfort you to know that I have been hacking away at a short story in the meantime. Funny how I can deem myself irrelevant in the face of words like those, but feel somehow more justified in spooling out some fiction.
Sometimes a truth stays ringing in my ears, hits my own personal resonance frequency, and I linger on it, taut and humming, until it fades. I’ll let you know when this one does.
