By Cormac McCarthy
To fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike
Asking yourself questions you hadn’t asked yourself
Maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything. One thing could be everything
If you had not become a mathematician what would you like to have been?
Dead
What I really wanted was a child. What I do really want. If I had a child I would just go in at night and sit there. Quietly. I would listen to my child breathing. If I had a child I wouldn’t care about reality
Intelligence is numbers
The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams
Ultimately you will accept your life whether you understand it or not
He thought that Oppenheimer’s intelligence was not entirely contained
The peculiarly material interests of God
I understood I was in a place where I was going to be for a long time and that I had to figure it out. That everything depended on my finding out where I was
It was hard to avoid the sense that the visual world is the creation of beings with the eyes to do so
Black fires. Like the fires of hell
You think sometimes I don’t listen
I think you listen. I’m not so sure what you hear
One’s convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one’s limitations as to the perception of it
They’re often inclined to give up what they treasure for what makes them miserable
The enemy of your undertaking is despair
I can stop whenever I like
And so can we all
It’s caring that heals, not theory. Good the world over
Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples
The days are long but the years are short
I would rather be dead with him than alive without him
How much of the brain’s circuitry is undedicated, simply awaiting the arrival of new opportunities?
Nothing smells like a three hundred year old violin
Bach’s Chaconne
If we’d had a child I would take it to where war seemed least probable
Anyone who doesn’t understand that the Manhattan project is one of the most significant events in human history hasn’t been paying attention
When you solve a problem there is always the compelling sense that the solution was there and that you have discovered it
Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you don’t understand numbers you won’t even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you
The unconscious will keep working on certain dreams, revising them, hoping you’ll get it
People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It’s been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It’s more faithful than God
The women look up from their washing and they understand at once that everything they have loved and nurtured has been put to naught. They have in an instant no past and no future. Everything they’ve taught their children has been stricken from the world without a trace and they are now widows and slaves. What they’ve seen is a mounted army gathered out of nowhere that stands aligned upon the hills above the village. The riders are clothed in skins and their horses wear shields of rawhide painted with circular geometries pale with dust. The men of the village have come from the huts with axe and spear but they will soon lie in pools of their communal blood and the women will be raped and the village torched and burned and they will then march weeping and bleeding and yoked like livestock to a country they’ve never seen, never imagined
Memory has substance
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that people in rubber rooms have a worldview at odds with that of the people who put them there
My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow
The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasn’t
Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief
You’re not seeking beauty, you’re seeking simplicity. The beauty comes later
What do you think is the one indispensable gift?
Faith
The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesn’t go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think?
What is your biggest complaint?
Their lack of imagination
Suicide scales with intelligence in the animal kingdom
I don’t think most children seriously consider the fact that they are going to be adults one day
If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it
The thing I remember my father saying was that he put his hands over his goggles against the initial flare of light and that when it came he could see the bones in his fingers with his eyes closed
And lastly of course the sound of it. The ungodly detonation followed by the slow rumble, the afterclap that rolled away over the burning countryside into a world that had never existed before this side of the sun. The desert creatures evaporating without a cry
I’m not sure how the Godless deal with death
Unless you’re willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little ice age of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then — knowing this perfect thing — took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin
Did you spend time with your brother?
Yes. As much as I could. I think I always knew what was coming
Well. sometimes people think that. After what was coming has arrived
The dream wakes us to tell us to remember
No one has ever seemed to comment that the stereotypical witch is meant to appear Jewish
I guess some other life would have to be some other place
I wanted to live in the mountains
Problems are always fun
Is it your belief that your pessimism is based on an understanding of the world not so readily available to other people?
At the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly
I think that it’s magic if you don’t understand it. As you learn more about it it becomes less magical
The thing that you’re dealing with — time — is immalleable. Except that the more you harbor it the less of it you have. The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground. You need to hurry
Solving problems. When things suddenly fall into place after days of labor it’s like a lost animal coming in out of the rain
The Ogdoad
Mental illness doesn’t seem to occur in animals
It solves problems and it’s perfectly capable of telling us the answers. But million year old habits die hard. It could easily say: Kekule, it’s a fucking ring. But it feels more comfortable cobbling up a hoop snake and rolling it inside Kekule’s skull while he’s dozing in front of the fire. It’s why your dreams are filled with drama and metaphor.
Creative destruction. All sorts of talents and skills must have been lost. Mostly communicative. But also things like navigation and probably even the richness of dreams. In the end this strange new code must have replaced at least part of the world with what can be said about it. Reality with opinion. Narrative with commentary.
It’s easier to remember two things than one. It’s why it’s easier to remember the words of a song than the words of a poem. For instance. The music is an armature upon which you assemble the words.
I wanted to be revered. I wanted to be entered like a cathedral
Because we’re here. We’re not someplace else. And there is nothing else to know
I understood that if you allowed yourself to become totally entangled you might not find your way out again. Worse, you might not want to
After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music
And I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died
