I’ve been considering a few of Cormac’s books of late. I had wanted to see the movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men but never did. I read the trilogy All the Pretty Horses and now I note that The Road is coming out as a movie.

This brought me to looking at the authors I really enjoy and the ones that may have let me see a world that was brutal, sensual, or stripped of its ecological niceties. Cormac writes in this brutal way that makes you pay attention. It strips away all the pretty and nice things and lets you see a world perhaps in the West that has terrible truth in it. I hated and loved Pretty Horses for that reason. It upset me, bothered me, made me want more.

The second guy that always got me was Edward Abbey. Mr. Abbey always struck me with his vision questing and desires to see a world for what it was. Desert Solitaire was perhaps the one book I read that made me love the desert even more than growing up in it, practicing archeology in it, seeing its myriad hues.

I remember also reading a passage from a mysterious author named Ambrose Bierce that simply disappeared into the west. Once asked what he thought about a book he was reviewing, he remarked that there were too many pages between the covers. As the venerable wikipedia notes in the link, Bierce simply disappeared. I watched a Gregory Peck movie onced called Old Gringo that tried to capture that moment. Krakauer’s Into the Wild remains the most disturbing vision quest movie though for me. It still haunts steps I take.

Why, I wonder. Because we all take steps like a wandering Alexander SuperTramp. Because we all know that we each have journeyed forth on perilous reaches. Some like Bierce and Christopher did not come back and their mark was larger than their reach.

I wanted to tie a blogpost together with string and twine and wire that made people see that we can read material that challenges, perhaps threatens, even disgusts us at times. Because life is that way. Its not all Winnie the Pooh and 100 acre woods and Piglets that get hungry and afraid. Its terrible lonely death in obscure border towns. They are Cormac’s rules and life either goes on or not.

Most often it does, but some of us are not there for the return trip.