Sorrowing and delighting the world ~ Malinda Words

‘The Road’ is not Cormac McCarthy’s best known novel even though it was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although not talked of much initially, it is his ‘Blood Meridian’ that has come to be recognized as his magnum opus and indeed as one of the greatest ‘American’ novels of all time (that’s US American of course).

Cormac McCarthy passed away a few days ago. He was almost 90 years old. I was not familiar with his work. Yesterday someone posted a quote from ‘The Road,’ with an ‘RIP’ at the end of it.

‘Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.’ That’s the quote. So I searched.

‘The Road,’ is said to detail a journey of a father and his son over several months ‘across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilisation and almost all life. I don’t know the context in which the above words were spoken or written down as a comment of the author, but they certainly resonate with this blurb.

I also came across an appreciation written by A.O. Scott and published in the New York Times. Scott’s first line is telling: 'A page of Cormac McCarthy might sometimes be taken for poetry or scripture: the lean lines; the sparse punctuation; the jagged right-hand margin.’

True. I read the quote again and I will write it down here so you and I can reflect on it further: ‘Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.’

That’s not ‘a page of Cormac McCarthy.’ It’s just a single line. Prose? Well, it was taken from a novel, so ‘yes’ would be the answer. Poetry? Of course. Scripture? Why not!

We can take that line out of the book, out of dystopian landscapes, out of the Americas, out of time and it still holds. McCarthy makes us ask a timeless question: are landscapes sorrowful or is it our eyes, borrowed or otherwise, that sorrow them or make them seem sorrowful? It is a question about the observer and the observed. Physics has explored this and concluded that the observer will leave a trace on the observed.

Poets or rather critics have considered such things and come up with the term ‘pathetic fallacy.’ The poet (or writer or any other kind of artist) can attribute human feelings and responses to inanimate things or any kind of creature, wild and wonderful, big and small.

And so, that which one finds lovely would be shrouded in pain in the eyes of another. We can sorrow landscapes, we can make them joyful, despondent, reflective, meditative, angry or apathetic. We give them an additional dimension of life. We can also rob them of crucial elements of being. It’s a useful tool for a writer. Literature and art are made of such things. A communications device, then.

McCarthy has offered a layer of time or indeed layered it all with time. He has framed it with sin or debt. He’s written about a yesterday, a tomorrow and yet he’s also positioning the reader in this very moment of reading and being.

Whose time have we borrowed, we must now ask. Who has loaned us a world? And what are those loaned worlds made of? What do we do with it? Are we planning to scar or caress? Would be heal if we caressed or would be scarring in ways unanticipated? And those other eyes that might stray towards the outcomes we generate, would they be sorrowful on account of what they find or were they sad anyway and regardless of the splendour and magic before them would they nevertheless clutter it all with sorrow?

Did someone ‘sorrow a world and an era,’ that made borrowing inevitable? Did we then decide to ignore histories and treat sorrow and sorrowing as the only things that count?

Prose, poetry and scripture; just words, just preferences, and yet that singular ability to say something and have it labeled in a multiplicity of ways speaks of exceptional writing skills. The truth is that the lines of life are for the most part lean. Punctuation is not the preserve of those who write simply by living. The margins on either side are jagged.

The world sorrows us and we sorrow the world. And yet, despite all this, the world delights and is delighted by those who walk this earth. People like Cormac McCarthy.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

16 June 2023

Sorrowing and delighting the world

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