like runaway suns

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. This is the third McCarthy I’ve read, following The Road and No Country for Old Men, both of which I loved.

Years ago I lived for a short time in Kansas starting up an English program for Chinese students at one of the million small colleges in the Midwest. I ran into my counterpart (rival) at a larger college once or twice and I remember him talking about McCarthy in a very haughty way, how important he was, how I’d never read anything unless I’d read McCarthy, and blah blah blah, so of course there on the spot I swore a blood oath never to read that macho McCarthy.

I’m lucky to be a disloyal kind of chump because McCarthy is sensational. Here are two gorgeous sentences from Blood Meridian...

He told how they’d taken the city of Chihuahua, an army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the hills in buggies and picknicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.

About that fire were men whose eyes gave back the light like coals socketed hot in their skulls and men whose eyes did not, but the black man’s eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and unrectified night from what of it lay behind to what was yet to come.