The Crossing

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This is the second novel in The Border Trilogy. The first one, All the Pretty Horses, was good, but I liked this one even more. They’re only loosely connected by theme so you don’t need to read them in order. There’s a lot of Spanish dialogue – I had to keep the translator app on my phone handy to avoid missing things. Like other McCarthy novels, the story has a lot of vivid descriptions of landscapes and journeys and violence, interspersed with philosophical monologues. The one about the ex-priest and the heretic (pp. 142–158) feels like the focal point of the book. Below are my highlights of passages that stuck out to me.

Part I

Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be trying some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable. p. 22

The ranchers said they [wolves] brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols. p. 25

Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who’d perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them. p. 31

The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only. p. 46

The old man said that it was not a question of finding such a place but rather of knowing it when it presented itself. He said that it was at such places that God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at such pains to create. p. 47

She looked up at him, the eye delicately aslant, the knowledge of the world it held sufficient to the day if not the day’s evil. p. 55

The night was falling down from the east and the darkness that passed over them came in a sudden breath of cold and stillness and passed on. As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun’s assassin hurrying to the west as once men did believe, as they may believe again. pp. 72–73

She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart. p. 105

The small sands in that waste was all there was for the wind to move and it moved with a constant migratory seething upon itself. As if in its ultimate granulation the world sought some stay against its own eternal wheeling. p. 112

Part II

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now. p. 129

In that wild high country he’d lie in the cold and the dark and listen to the wind and watch the last few embers of his fire at their dying and the red crazings in the woodcoals where they broke along their unguessed gridlines. As if in the trying of the wood were elicited hidden geometries and their orders which could only stand fully revealed, such is the way of the world, in darkness and ashes. p. 130

He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. p. 134

What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so 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 also are 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 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 being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its homes and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. p. 143

The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? p. 148

And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow’s clothing. p. 148

He said that in any case a bad map was worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside those instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. p. 185

He said that far from making men reflective or wise it was his experience that death often leads them to attribute great consequence to trivial things. p. 186

You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all the wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such a value. p. 202

Part III

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. p. 230

The old man said the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought. pp. 235–236

He said that the light of the world was in men’s eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see. p. 283

He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. p. 291

He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them. p. 292

He said that the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. p. 292

And she said that since this was so nor could it be altered one was better to follow one’s heart in joy and in misery than simply to seek comfort for there was none. To seek it was only to welcome in the misery and to know little else. p. 322

For the enmity of the world was newly plain to him that day and cold and inameliorate as it must be to all who have no longer cause except themselves to stand against it. p. 331

Part IV

He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. p. 379

The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men. It believes that where two men meet one of two things can occur and nothing else. In the one case a lie is born and in the other death. p. 386

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God. p. 387

He said that men assume the truth of a thing to reside in that thing without regard to the opinions of those beholding it while that which is fraudulent is held to be so no matter how closely it might duplicate the required appearance. p. 405

From a certain perspective one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will.p. 410

He looked out down the road and he looked toward the fading light. Darkening shapes of cloud all along the northern rim. It had ceased raining in the night and a broken rainbow or watergall stood out on the desert in a dim neon bow and he looked again at the road which lay as before yet more dark and darkening still where it ran on to the east and where there was no sun and there was no dawn and when he looked again toward the north the light was drawing away faster and that noon in which he’d woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark and the birds that flew had lighted and all had hushed once again in the bracken by the road. p. 425