/lit/ - Literature

>>21462595
Petra Mundik explains, “On the surface level, this passage can be interpreted quite prosaically. For example, John Sepich argues that the novel’s epilogue is literally a description of digging postholes using a throw-down tool and this serves as a description of a historically significant ‘step toward the fencing of open range.’” However, as McCarthy wrote to his editor, Albert Erskine, in 1979, “The truth is that the historical material is really – to me – little more than a framework upon which to hang a dramatic inquiry into the nature of destiny and history and the uses of reason and knowledge and the nature of evil and all these sorts of things which have plagued folks since there were folks.”

McCarthy perhaps provides another oblique clue to the meaning of the epilogue in the novel’s second epigraph from Six Theosophic Points by German mystic Jacob Boehme: “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.” In the introduction to Boehme’s Six Theosophic Points, Nicolas Berdyaev relates that Boehme’s soul “was a pure soul and good and full of compassion. But his feeling for the life of the world was hard and far from sentimental.” Additionally, Boehme perceived “God not only as love but also as wrath.” In 1600, Boehme had his first of several mystical experiences. “Sitting one day in his room his eyes fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvelous splendor that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things.” “In this moment was revealed to him the concept of the Unground or the Abyss; essentially, an undifferentiated entity that was defined as the absence of everything.” McCarthy references Boehme’s recognition of God’s wrath or the Unground during the Comanche attack on Captain White’s company when up from the offside of the ponies rises “a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies” (52). The sergeant speaks truer than he knows when he exclaims, “Oh my god” (53). Berdyaev explains:

“The Unground, thus, is nothingness, the unfathomable eye of eternity and at the same time a will, a will without bottom, abysmal, indeterminate. But it is a nothingness which is the hunger for ‘something.’ At the same time, the Unground is ‘freedom.’ In the darkness of the Unground blaze the flames signifying freedom, meontic, potential freedom.” Meontic means “that aspect of artistic creativity seeking to depict what has not been seen or experienced in reality.”

>>19697082
>>19696553
I'll bring the horses