More from Cities on the Plain

John Grady and Mr. Johnson talking:

"Did you break horses, Mr Johnson?

Some. Mostly just what was required. I was never a twister in any sense of the word. I got hurt once pretty bad. You can get spooked and not know it. Just little things. You dont hardly even know it.

But you like to ride.

I do. Margaret could outride me two to one though. As good a woman with a horse as I ever saw. Way bettern me. Hard thing for a man to admit but its the truth."




Eduardo and Billy talking:

"Your friend is in the grip of an irrational passion. Nothing you say to him will matter. He has in his head a certain story. Of how things will be. In this story he will be happy. What is wrong with this story?

You tell me.

What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that?

Billy put his hat on. I thank you for your time, he said.

You are welcome."




Billy and John Grady talking:

"They sipped their coffee. The wind blew. They pulled their blankets about their shoulders.

I aint jealous you know.

I never said you were.

I know. You might of thought it though. Truth is, I wouldnt pull your boots on at gunpoint.

I know.

Bill lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back. He smoked. It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, doesnt it?

Yes. It does.

There's a lot of things look better at a distance.

Yeah?

I think so.

I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one.

Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too."



John Grady and Joaquin talking:

"You think we got em all?

Hard to say.

I'd say we broke a few of em of their habits.

I'd say we did too.

How many of Archer's dogs come up here with you?

Three.

Well we aint but got two.

They turned in their saddles and scanned the mesa.

Where do you reckon he's got to?

I dont know, said Joaquin.

He could have gone down the far side of yonder.

Joaquin leaned and spat and turned his horse. Let's go, he said. He could be anywheres There's always one that dont want to go home."



The maestro:

"I only know that every act which has no heart will be found out in the end. Every gesture."

Cities of the Plain

"When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain. Anyway this country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everything. I dont think people even know it yet.

The sky to the west darkened. A cold wind blew. They could see the aura of the lights form the city come up forty miles away.

You need to wear more clothes than that, Billy said.

I'm all right. How did the war change it?

It just did. It aint the same no more. It never will be."

From Cities of the Plains by Cormac McCarthy, the third book of the Border Trilogy that starts with All the Pretty Horses then The Crossing. Here we have a couple of cowboys talking about how their life changed. There aren't supposed to be cities on the plains. There are supposed to be cattle and horses and cowboys and ranches. Life changes.

That quote is so appropriate for today. The business on Wall Street changed the world, and I don't think people quite get it yet. It's going to change it in ways we can't even tell yet. And many of us don't know how it did it, but we'll see it. Like Billy said, it just did, that's all we'll know.

From the price of groceries to the the value of the dollar. To how we'll have to change our lifestyles. At least most of us. Many of us.

And personally, I think it will be for the better, in some ways. In many ways. I'm working my butt off right now to be completely debt-free in less than a year. I've been working towards that for a while now, before the recession. Just stopped using credit cards and lived with the cash in my pocket. I think long and hard before I spend even a dollar. Stopped eating out. Thought twice before even treating myself to a cup of coffee. Started taking the beer bottles back for deposit. Sue agrees. And even if it's only a couple of dollars, I say to Sue, that'll buy a lot of beer in Mexico. I say that because right now I can't see us living the rest of our lives in the United States. It's too expensive, not a very kind nation, right now at least, and I can't see getting old here. We're a cruel country right now. Maybe Obama and the Democrats will change that. But I'm not holding my breath.

I think all of this consumerism has really hurt us in a deep and real way. I think long ago people began compromising their values and ethics just to protect their big homes and second homes and wide-screen TVs and SUVs, compromising to the point where they don't even know they're doing it anymore. Living simply makes you look long and hard at what you value, makes you decide what you value. We--well, not me, but a lot of people--have had it awfully easy and been given so much. And living soft makes people mean and cruel. I know most think that living hard makes one hard, but my experience is that when someone suffered some, most people--not all but most--will be a bit more empathetic towards their fellow human. They know what it's like to suffer, to be in a tight spot, and by alleviating someone else's pain, it's like alleviating their own a bit. Of course some people just get mean and bitter, but they'd probably end up that way any way.

A life's work

Okay, maybe you've had your fill of No Country for Old Men. This is the last quote I'll blog from the book.

"I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it. It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that's something I dont want to be wrong about."

Psychotherapy is the best thing we got here in the Western world to help us in self-actualization. I've used it in the past, and it helped. I know I'm not going to reach Nirvana this time around, but I want to be a helluva lot closer to it when I leave this life than when I got here. Like the old sheriff says, it's a life's work, and it's a helluva thing to think that you could spend your entire life doing something and be wrong in the end. But what are you going to do? Just sit in a hole?

Picking a sore

"It was like a ballplayer told me one time he said that if he had some slight injury and it bothered him a little bit, nagged at him, he generally played better. It kept his mind focused on one thing instead of a hundred. I can understand that. Not that it changes anything."

I don't know why this struck me the way it did. It's just that so much of what Cormac McCarthy writes I get. Even his sentence structure. Did you get that? That cadence? That ordering of the words? That uniquely American construct?

And he's so good at putting the intangibles of life into words. When something's eating at us, most of us, we tend to pick the sore until we figure it out. And then we move on. A ballplayer plays better. The rest of us just live a bit better.

The power of literature

"Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking me that I second say the world. Do you see?

Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.

Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her."

I know exactly how that woman felt. In some ways, I've experienced exactly what she experienced. How for the longest time I refused to believe that there was such a person. And when you do finally acknowledge it, it's the end of a life. But then you can prevail. It's a very spiritual thought when you realize it. Death and rebirth. Good and evil. It's at the heart of Christianity.

Maybe it's being an actor. Or a writer. I don't know. I don't know if others experience movies and literature and paintings the way I do. I don't care. I just know how I do, and I love it. I love a good writer who can just miraculously choose words out of the thousands of words and put them in a certain order, the right order, to elicit an emotion like I felt when I read those words. That emotion that said, yes, yes, I know.

The hardest thing I've ever done

"The man that shot you died in prison.

In Angola. Yes.

What would you have done if he'd been released?

I dont know. Nothin. There wouldnt be no point to it. There aint no point to it. Not to any of it.

I'm kindly surprised to hear you say that.

You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more going out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it."

It's hard. It's hard to get past the anger and the injustice and the unfairness when someone gets away with something big and mean. When someone gets away with murder. But the anger just feeds on you, not on the person who caused it. They couldn't care less how you feel. They wouldn't have done what they did if they cared about you. And the anger will never go away completely. It eventually will go down deep inside you, and surface occasionally, in funny ways. But it's best to be like the old man, who was shot and couldn't walk anymore, and just rebuild a new life. But like I said, it's hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life so far.

Regrets and happiness

"What's your biggest regret in life.

The old man looked at him, gauging the question. I dont know, he said. I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I reckon bein able to walk around might be one. You can make up your own list. You might even have one. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're gonna be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've known people who never did get the hang of it."

I've been happy and I've been unhappy. The worst was in between, when I didn't feel anything at all. Happy, of course, is the best, but it can make a person afraid, and cautious, so they don't do anything...they don't act or decide anything because they're afraid to lose the happiness...they try to keep the status quo by not doing anything, but it almost seems that happiness is independent of everything and anything. Happy people just seem to be like that, don't they? They're just naturally cheerful, and they don't let anything get in the way of it.

Life's lesson

She put her cigarettes in her purse and looked at him. I'll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it's all that more likely it'll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that.

Bell nodded. I ain't a stranger to them thoughts, Carla Jean. Them thoughts is very familiar to me.

--No Country for Old Men

Why we need less laws

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

--No Country for Old Men

The Road

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none."

Wow. Those are the opening lines of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I needed a good book. I just finished Into the Wild, and when my days are kind of gray the way they have been for what seems like a long time now, I need something to preoccupy my mind. To take it far, far away from here. And since I can't bring a guitar on the train for the two hours I'm riding it, that means a book.

Still, there's something very hopeful about those lines, huh? About him feeling the child breathing next to him. Maybe you have to be a parent to feel that. Once I wrote the line, "When my daughter sleeps, the warmth that comes off her head could breathe the life back into a dead man."

Because it did.

All the Pretty Horses

I'd of thought maybe the disappointments of your own life might of made you more sympathetic to other people.

You would have thought wrongly.

I guess so.

It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.

I guess it depends on the people.