A Hard Week

It's been a hard week. Mark Sanford, Sarah Palin, Michael Jackson, North Korean cyber attack, more deaths in Afghanistan, serial killer (shot and killed) in South Carolina, the usual sarcastic and whining/screaming BS on FOX News, and the continual lies from politicians and the media. It's hard to know what is the truth these days, and perhaps we never knew and will never know. Some think there is such a thing as "absolute truth," but prove it to me. Maybe truth, like beauty, is relative to whatever situation is before one's eyes. We all see things differently---there is no debate about that---and do so filtered through our individual history, personality, education, experience, temperament, spirituality, emotionality, and level of sanity.

I have just finished reading The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy (author of No Country for Old Men, made into a recent movie). The three volumes are: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). I am sharing one passage from each volume because these excerpts represent philosophies that are worth serious "think-time." They are compelling, profound, disturbing, and (ironically) comforting words.

From All The Pretty Horses: "He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man, for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness. I wanted very much to be a person of value, and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value, that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning, I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage is a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandons first. After this, all other betrayals come easily. I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others, but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That the desire was the thing itself. The thing itself. I could think of nothing else of which that was true."

From The Crossing: "Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us, they no longer have even a name. The story, on the other hand, can never be lost from its place in the world, for it is that place. There is but one world, and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales, and yet these also are the self-same tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are, of course, in the tale itself, and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only, and there it lives and makes it home, and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling, there is no end. And whether in Caborca or Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all, I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard, all tales are one. "

From Cities of the Plain: "He was not a man given to illusions. He knew that those things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us while that which we would put away seems often by that very wish to become endowed with unsuspected powers of endurance. He knew how frail is the memory of loved ones. How we close our eyes and speak to them. How we long to hear their voices once again, and how those voices and those memories grow faint and faint until what was flesh and blood is no more than echo and shadow. In the end, perhaps not even that. He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred, the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him."