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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

the road, cormac mccarthy.

the road by cormac mccarthy was a trip. i noticed when i added it to my facebook CURRENTLY READING tab, that it was a winner of some oprah award, or that it was an oprah recommendation. nearly crushed my world. but cormac mccarthy wrote no country for old men, and i'll be damned if i don't fish out all that i can from the creator of that genius. the road follows a boy and a man through the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic somewhere. the people you see, the places you explore, and the skies you duck under all scream disastermath. i love the way that these two lived and the fashion in which it was narrated. a great book, and a quick read. i took no lesson from it, and i hope that it wasn't a form of metaphor for weight loss, jesus, finance, or love. i hope it was just a dark passage to continue carrying the fire.
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"a blackness to hurt your ears with listening."

"an old chronicle. to seek out the upright."

"and the dreams so rich in color. how else would death call you? waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to day."

"in those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators."

"the color of it moved something in him long forgotten. make a list. recite a litany. remember."

"where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."

"golden chalice, good to house a god. please don't tell me how the story ends."

"the world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell."

"when your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. do you understand? and you can't give up. i won't let you."

"he wanted to be able to see. look around you, he said. there is no prophet in earth's long chronicle who is not honored here today. whatever form you spoke of you were right."

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