Waiting for the Feast...

As the title suggests, much like Jones and Tweed (hello Tweed), "A Moveable Feast" remains elusive. I'm a little farther along today than I was yesterday, and plan to finish it probably tonight. But because of the hype, and since the title of this little blog is dedicated to Hem, I feel as though I should put off the True First, and begin with a warm up blog piece. Therefore, I give you:

"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

(Date Read - July 18 thru 22, primarily in bed before sleep)

Here is what I found after reading my first Cormac. (I love that name. Cormac. I'll read his books just so I can say his name out loud. "I'm reading a Cormac." Anyway.) Maybe it's because I'm reading Hemingway, but I noticed Cormac's style of writing much quicker than I caught onto the plot. It's so spare, so terse, so devoid of Author (in fact, it's SO devoid of Author, you almost can't help but be overcome by Cormac's presence) that I had a hard time getting ahold of the story.

When I first approached the book, I thought I'd be reading a heavy weight, an author's author full of DeLillo-ish phrases and drawn out back country descriptions. And to some extent, that is there. But it's not in your face, and it's not obnoxious.

When Cormac writes Sherriff Bell bemoaning the loss of a generation of kindness and gentleness, I remembered the words of Hem in the chapter, "Une Generation Perdue." Cormac writes of the generation of the 1980s as those who have lost their way, and points to his earlier comrades in the WWII era as being all grace and eloquence. But the term was popularized by Hemingway, quoting Gertrude Stein, who referenced it towards the youth of WWI.

Perhaps the line most fitting for thinking about loss is this one given by Bell after seeing the carnage in the desert. "I just have this feelin we're looking at something we really aint never even seen before." It's not so much that Bell is looking at the scenes unfolding around him and mourning the generation he just left. No, he has his own mixed emotions about his time as a boy soldier. It's that he knows the world is moving forward and is leaving him behind. He's not sorry to be left behind. He's sorry that the world has come to this.

The title of No Country comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats. The first stanza goes something like this:

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

It's an interesting poem for Cormac to choose, for such a title, and with such a storyline. Yeats seems to be reacting to the plenty and youth of a rich era, saying that this is no place to be old and frail. You must have movement in a lush country. You must have vigor and stamina and be able to enjoy the abundance of the earth.

Cormac's country is about as far from Byzantium as Yeats can get. It is nearly lawless, spare and desert-like, full of violence and bloodshed and acts of rationalized psychopathetic lunacy. It is not a country for old men, not because of the need for vigor and vitality to enjoy, but rather because it is only the loss of something that enables the youth to survive within it. Old men have died off in this country because they cannot stand the loss. Young men die off in this country, because they cannot live with the loss. Bell will die soon and leave Chigurh as one of the sole survivors, he is who is the most empty. It is a doomed place.

...

I loved "No Country." I thought it was a frenetic, bloody story told by a kind hearted man sitting in a rocking chair. It was a story that was gritty to read all the way through, and it made that rough, spare voice that much more compelling. I love a story that makes me pause and think and wonder about the way of things. And more than anything, I love a story that sings.