Thanks for this: As an antidote, they always need to keep alive their “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal.” He worried that Americans would loose themselves onto material pursuits and thus lose sight of the transcendent realm. And it matters little, he implied, which religious tradition becomes the conduit. Even the teaching of the transmigration of souls — a Hindu idea enmeshed in Tagore — is preferable to relentless careerism. Endlessness is a tonic to democracy.
I am such a truster in everlasting lives of collaborating rememberers. The veil now and veils all the way back a forward—without selective entropy no intelligible value exists. The LDS infinite is so dynamic it needs to ‘slow down’ to be enjoyed. Here we celebrate the veil of incarnate particular forms all moving at different rates of change—allowing us to feel solid and loyal, to love—we are always transcending but would never ‘get it’ unless we lived veiled in entropic moments like this. We are food for worms now so we appreciate eternal banquets.
Randy, you make a fine point, one that typically flies so low under our cognitive radars as to qualify under that broad rubric of tacit, implied, experiential, hidden knowledge. Without this limited entropic influence, we would be infinite fish swimming in infinite seas with no infinite clue that we were in fact infinite. When everything is transcendent, nothing is transcendent.
I love what you write about the transcendence that he finds in nature. You know I've been writing about McCarthy's The Road. After our conversation the other day, I've found new meaning in the novel's ending, hope in the hopeless post apocalyptic world, hope from the deep glens of nature.
Here a draft:
The father stands heroically but ultimately doomed in opposition to the overwhelming forces of entropy, seeking the while upright indications of transcendent meaning. After his death, the son is taken in by a good family, whose father stands waiting for the boy. The novel concludes with an evocative reference to a memory of fish that has appeared twice earlier in the novel: first with the father standing on a bridge looking down at a pool filled with gray foam where “once he’d watched trout swaying in the current” (25) and then when the father “stood watching the river. . . . He’d stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool” (35). In the final paragraph, it is not the father standing and remembering; he is dead. The narrator tells readers that
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the montains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (241)
What do we make of this ending? This “thing” is gone, will not be made right again. Once: humans were still to come and the deep glens hummed of mystery. Might we read this paragraph as a “once” and future ending? Following the boy’s promising adoption by good people, “carriers of the fire,” as his father insisted, can we read this ending as one more challenge to entropy?
The earlier trout were described as swaying, as flashing. These trout are “standing in the amber current.” Wouldn’t it surprise us, disappoint us, were entropy were to have the final say in McCarthy's work? Were there nothing, noone to stand against the void?
Scott, you are doing an absolutely brilliant mining of the standing metaphor throughout McCarthy and throughout literature altogether. This challenge to entropy in the form of fish and in the form of the "fire carriers" (one cannot carry lest one is standing) seems like a perfect way for Cormac to offer his final say regarding humankind's resilience, a final salvo of hope amid the cycles of destruction.
Thanks for this: As an antidote, they always need to keep alive their “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal.” He worried that Americans would loose themselves onto material pursuits and thus lose sight of the transcendent realm. And it matters little, he implied, which religious tradition becomes the conduit. Even the teaching of the transmigration of souls — a Hindu idea enmeshed in Tagore — is preferable to relentless careerism. Endlessness is a tonic to democracy.
I am such a truster in everlasting lives of collaborating rememberers. The veil now and veils all the way back a forward—without selective entropy no intelligible value exists. The LDS infinite is so dynamic it needs to ‘slow down’ to be enjoyed. Here we celebrate the veil of incarnate particular forms all moving at different rates of change—allowing us to feel solid and loyal, to love—we are always transcending but would never ‘get it’ unless we lived veiled in entropic moments like this. We are food for worms now so we appreciate eternal banquets.
Randy, you make a fine point, one that typically flies so low under our cognitive radars as to qualify under that broad rubric of tacit, implied, experiential, hidden knowledge. Without this limited entropic influence, we would be infinite fish swimming in infinite seas with no infinite clue that we were in fact infinite. When everything is transcendent, nothing is transcendent.
Yes. Swimming in Eternity. Sounds like a book or poem title.
I love what you write about the transcendence that he finds in nature. You know I've been writing about McCarthy's The Road. After our conversation the other day, I've found new meaning in the novel's ending, hope in the hopeless post apocalyptic world, hope from the deep glens of nature.
Here a draft:
The father stands heroically but ultimately doomed in opposition to the overwhelming forces of entropy, seeking the while upright indications of transcendent meaning. After his death, the son is taken in by a good family, whose father stands waiting for the boy. The novel concludes with an evocative reference to a memory of fish that has appeared twice earlier in the novel: first with the father standing on a bridge looking down at a pool filled with gray foam where “once he’d watched trout swaying in the current” (25) and then when the father “stood watching the river. . . . He’d stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool” (35). In the final paragraph, it is not the father standing and remembering; he is dead. The narrator tells readers that
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the montains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (241)
What do we make of this ending? This “thing” is gone, will not be made right again. Once: humans were still to come and the deep glens hummed of mystery. Might we read this paragraph as a “once” and future ending? Following the boy’s promising adoption by good people, “carriers of the fire,” as his father insisted, can we read this ending as one more challenge to entropy?
The earlier trout were described as swaying, as flashing. These trout are “standing in the amber current.” Wouldn’t it surprise us, disappoint us, were entropy were to have the final say in McCarthy's work? Were there nothing, noone to stand against the void?
Scott, you are doing an absolutely brilliant mining of the standing metaphor throughout McCarthy and throughout literature altogether. This challenge to entropy in the form of fish and in the form of the "fire carriers" (one cannot carry lest one is standing) seems like a perfect way for Cormac to offer his final say regarding humankind's resilience, a final salvo of hope amid the cycles of destruction.