Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses
I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
Thanks to @michaelschaub for the push (I’d read only the darker McCarthy: Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men.) On the surface, I find a lot of McCarthy terribly pretentious (no punctuation for dialogue, untranslated Spanish I can’t understand, etc.) but like the other books of his, I’ve read, the story grabbed me and I had to finish it. A pretty beautiful western.
Filed under: my reading year 2014
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