Well Written Wednesdays: His voice is not to be mistaken

Snowstorm by J.M.W. Turner

I read All The Pretty Horses last year and liked it. Then this month I read The Crossing, and . . .

Oh my, friends. Love. Love love love. Dr. Somerville was right, and I am now convinced of McCarthy's genius. When we have a boy we will name him Cormac. (Well, maybe not. Jared already decided that we're naming him Yul.)

In any case, I can't wait to get the final book of the border trilogy. Then I will take the plunge into Blood Meridian . . . eep.

And the priest? A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man. Something of a philosopher. Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all. He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred. He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.

There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay His presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it. So. The priest in the very generosity of his spirit stood in mortal peril and knew it not. He believed in a boundless God without center or circumference. By this very formlessness he'd sought to make God manageable. This was his colindancia. In his grandness he had ceded all terrain. And in this colindancia God had no say at all.

-from The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy