Chris, exactly before receiving this blog post I literally just read the following excerpt from McCarthy’s, The Crossing, in a FB post, and found myself thinking, “It just needs the heading, ‘The Kingdom of God is like...’”
“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 are also the selfsame 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 beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”
Few statements in all the books I’ve read and all the sermons I’ve heard were as gripping, humbling or convicting as McCarthy’s line after introducing the despicable Lester Ballard: “A child of God much like yourself perhaps.”
Thank you for this tribute to Cormac. A singular voice, an irrefutable talent but most of all a voice of lament in an era of obfuscation and false glamour. His work will prove more timeless than Dickens, more provocative than Huxley.
Chris, exactly before receiving this blog post I literally just read the following excerpt from McCarthy’s, The Crossing, in a FB post, and found myself thinking, “It just needs the heading, ‘The Kingdom of God is like...’”
“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 are also the selfsame 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 beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”
Few statements in all the books I’ve read and all the sermons I’ve heard were as gripping, humbling or convicting as McCarthy’s line after introducing the despicable Lester Ballard: “A child of God much like yourself perhaps.”
Thank you for this tribute to Cormac. A singular voice, an irrefutable talent but most of all a voice of lament in an era of obfuscation and false glamour. His work will prove more timeless than Dickens, more provocative than Huxley.