Some of the Music of Existence Falls Silent when a Great Witness of Being Passes: Cormac McCarthy Leaves Us

THERE HAS BEEN too much dying, lately, in the human and more-than-merely-human worlds. Buses crash, dams are blown, drought reigns, violence flares, vengeance goes viral. Souls are annihilated by tyrannies and digits; authenticity is quelled by artifice. On top of all the misadventure and general badness, it is true, as Atul Gawande puts it, that our bodies wear until they can wear no more. Life runs out for each of us.

There is always too much dying. And each death leaves a lifelong sadness in the world, where the one who dies was known and loved. But there is a sadness worlds deep, and the universe hangs unhinged, its gates swinging madly, when a great one, known to so many and so intimately through their art, passes. As Cormac McCarthy has done overnight. He leaves his words, though, and the very great difference they have made and will go on making—to a human understanding of land and unbelonging, and of our capacity to hold a slender meridian, most of the time, between darkness and light, between cruelty and tenderness, between thought and embodied sense, as Cormac’s prose did—and sometimes to fall and nearly always to find one’s forgiven feet again.

So farewell, Cormac McCarthy. Your writing was a habitable wilderness for me and many. Your sentences taught me poetry and the mathematics of grace. Thank you for being among us in your life and in your works. Thank you for your serious heart and the wild and tender music of your mind and how you spoke it.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/13/cormac-mccarthy-dead-novelist