A horse a horse

My college poetry professor, a renowned aesthete/scamp/hipster, would read us works by John Donne, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens; eyes closed, lips and tongue teasing out each sweet note, he’d actually sigh from the pleasures of a well-written line. One time he exclaimed (without a hint of irony), "Oh, I want to get down on the floor and hug that sentence!" I think of what he said whenever I read anything that just knocks… me… out. Enter Cormac McCarthy. I recently picked up Blood Meridian (1985) after I read an article about McCarthy in The New Yorker and have spent my subway rides since reading and rereading his beautiful sentences, offering up my own exclamations (usually, Holy Sh_t!). McCarthy’s writing is lean and efficient, and never stingy. It complements his Wild West setting without stooping to hokiness. "By full dark the blackened ribracks leaned steaming at the fires and there was a jousting over the coals with shaven sticks whereon were skewered gobs of meat and a clank of canteens and endless raillery." There’s a quietness to it that allows the reader time to see, engage, and appreciate. McCarthy’s characters have almost no interior life, we never know what they’re thinking or feeling. Like some twisted American doppelganger of Virginia Woolf, he writes only exteriority, action, and consequences. Here, he describes an oncoming cattle drive: "By late afternoon, riders were visible to the bare eye, a handful of ragged indians mending the outer flanks of the herd with their nimble ponies." I love "mending" and pretty much all of his other verbs "knuckled," "unseamed," unstalled." Yep, for the next few weeks, if you see me with a glazed look in my eye, know that I’m in a good place: a land of pumice, mud, blood, broken bottles, and mincing wolves.