Rebel Yell - S.C. Gwynne

Gwynne’s storytelling of the life of Stonewall Jackson gets better and sharper as this history goes along. Chancellorsville is particularly animated and thorough and in this ultimate moment Jackson’s actions and responses mesh well with Gwynne’s evocation of the character throughout. The biography peels back the legend. The difficulty in treating Jackson, or any Confederate, in our modern moment, is how to treat the cause; perhaps those difficulties are given too short shrift. Gwynne does show that, while the conflict tore the country apart, a type of camaraderie existed across the lines. 

“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

Sad and evocative in a variety of ways. The story moves with a liveliness that I had missed on previous readings. The language and dialogue is seamlessly constructed and moves with the narrative between people, the landscape, and horses. Action also becomes a slowly-emerging form of understanding a person’s character.

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Third time in less than a year and I feel like I am starting to get it. The extent of the driftlessness and suffering cannot be overlooked. The judge, whether right or wrong, targets the Kid because he alone kept himself removed from the cleanliness of pure violence the others partook in. If war is god, then to withhold pieces of oneself is a type of defiance akin to Lucifer. Non serviam. Yet the judge, in his worldliness is a type of violence personified. And, therefore, he fits; is equipped for each situation. God as recognizable to the uninitiated, is dead. The judge, even in his seeming immortality which makes any claim dubious, may be the manifestation of an entirely material cosmology. One either blissfully or dangerously without arbiter. There is a trace of right and wrong in the Kid (though what are his actions on the raids?). It seems the judge cannot abide this. Finally, even the Kid is swallowed by the embrace of war as god.