Quotidian
Posted By Claire on September 4, 2010
“Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them” – Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Nature takes an interesting place in Cormac McCarthy’s novels – it’s not quite a powerful, living entity on its own, but does often appear to be a sentient, breathing force underlying the thematic threads of his novels. Animals, however, take precedence even over nature – if McCarthy were to construct a Great Chain of Being, animals would almost certainly come in above humans, somewhere between men and angels. They are represented, not as higher consciousness, but rather as having a closer connection to God, a kind of elemental awareness or primal rightness which men in all their scrabbling around have somehow lost. I disagree, but it’s an interesting representation, and both coherent and cohesive in all his novels.
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