Outer Dark

And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.

Here's an excerpt from the Cormac McCarthy novel Outer Dark. It is a passage that describes the experience of the brief flash of light from a streak of lightning. Now I'm doing this off the top of my head, but I would probably write something like, "lightning flashed across the sky." It's the same second being described. And sure you might be able to see my phrase, but you can feel every word of McCarthy's. It's just amazing to me that he can focus so distinctly on such a miniscule amount of time. His description is haunting and it haunts me as an aspiring writer. How can you even have the thought of this vision, much less the words for it. He uses metaphor and other experience to accentuate and exact the perfect feeling and experience he means to derive from this description. And no this is not a brief shining moment within a novel of more plebeian description.

He stood in the center of the square where the tracks of commerce lay fossilized in the dried mud all about him, turning, an amphitheatrical figure in that moonwrought waste manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust.

Or, "he stood, in the moonlit night, looking at the rutted, mud road." You see the second, but feel the character's emotions of struggle and loneliness in McCarthy's version. This is the thing that I think amazes me most about his writing. I am often shocked and impressed with description and characters that I can imagine, see, and believe. But McCarthy goes beyond the call of visualizing and goes straight for the soul of the reader. He creates lines of prose that connect his imaginations directly to the heart of the reader. These characters are not simply believable, they do not simply feel, but they reach out to us and make us empathize, make us feel the loneliness of staring at a deserted square with only our own shadow to wrestle with. Unbelievable. McCarthy is not simply a master of emotion and reader empathy through long, descriptive scenes. It takes the greatest writer to know when it is best not to describe with longevity.

No. No preacher. What is there to preach? It's all plain enough. Word and flesh, I don't hold much with preaching.

Here, a blind man is speaking of religion and life with the protagonist. In other words, he's saying, "I'm not a preacher, I don't want to preach to you about life, I simply mean to remind you about living. It all comes down to the word and flesh. To people and what they say, to God and his children, to the leader and followers, to relationships and how we live them. But, rest assured, it is not preaching that gives this to you, it is living it, plain and simple." McCarthy masterfully fits in not only a paragraph's worth of meaning, but a book's worth, into a mere sentence. He doesn't constrict the reader into reading on the page everything exactly, because that's not the way of the word and flesh. That's not the way of life. He means to draw feeling, emotion, empathy from the reader, not the preach to him. He mean to show the reader's blindness to truly living. So reader, it's all plain enough, experience living.