‘No one comes. The news does not arrive. This scene may be a painting. I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. Perhaps I saw it in a book. As a child. But this is what I dreamed. I wish I had other words for you, Squire. To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all. I wish you calm waters, Squire. I always did.’
What was written above lies in The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy in the closing pages of what is the final effort of a dying breed in the literary tradition. At McCarthy’s age, 89, and what is apparent in his mannerisms of the past few years, he is sojourning with the final rider on the horizon, Death. There is much said in that paragraph, much of which comes from the maestro’s final exhalations. What more can be said on the topic? Nonetheless an effort will be made, and that paragraph, and book, still waits for you to open it.
Death is the final friend, the only one who remains beside us as we trespass into absolute impermanence. It holds no true name, it has no true being, and attempts to delimit its staying power, in the forms of religious providence or scientific discoveries about the possibility for consciousness after bodily death, are found wanting. There is no actualized escape from our one and only fate—that of knowing our end and, by extension, the end of all things, which is accompanied by our seemingly equal inability to challenge its permit over the celestial movement of all things. What we are left with considering the problems of its material impermanence and eternal staying is the feeling that approaches or runs from it, and the vestigial comportments which take the form of artistic tropes—love songs, ballads, poetry, Homeric epics—that seek to hold our hand.
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