Thoughts on the passing of Cormac McCarthy, Author

by Amanda Gailey

(special to The Dreher Report)

Cormac McCarthy died. About ten years ago, I went on a bender reading his beautiful and horrific novels until I hit a point when I realized the horror and nihilism were too much for me, that they were feeding a part of my mind that didn’t need the help. At the time, I lied to myself that the horrible things that haunted my imagination were false, that they would never come to pass. But many of them have. And that’s why, I guess, when I look at my son sometimes, one particular passage in The Road written by McCarthy comes to my mind:

“He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.”

I associate his books with a period when I was preoccupied with worry about something happening to my children. It was bad. I talked myself down eventually by trying not to indulge the worries and by rationally persuading myself of the statistics. And then guess what? It happened, some of the worst things you can imagine. Even if you have all the love, all the protective instincts, all the statistics on your side, it doesn’t fucking matter at all. That’s what The Road is really about—you can’t do a damned thing but stand there weeping while fate or chance or genetics or the sins of humanity do what they will with the only things that matter to you. So here’s to Cormac McCarthy who died June 13, 2023, and to all standing in the road looking back.

Amanda Gailey is Associate Professor, English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She specializes in digital text editing and nineteenth-century American literature, and regularly teaches classes in both of these areas. She has published Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age (U of Michigan P).  

Amanda co-edits Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing and The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature, 1880-1939 (under development at childlit.unl.edu). She has also contributed to the Walt Whitman Archive and the Spenser Archive.