Discussing the perennial questions with Cormac McCarthy.
The death of the novelist Cormac McCarthy revealed a great American library to the public. As a recent essay in the Smithsonian Magazine details, the famously private writer was a hoarding reader of at least 20,000 books, which crowded the halls of his Santa Fe estate.
This comes as no surprise. Of his few public remarks about his writing process, one was, “read,” and the other, “the ugly fact is books are made out of books.”
Among those books examined by scholars were the great works of the Western canon. Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, and thirteen copies of Melville’s Moby Dick, all heavily annotated. And not only, or even primarily, the greats of literature. There were 142 books by or about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, works on Kierkegaard, books of high mathematical theory, and likely many more on any other philosopher worth reading.
Again, this should not surprise. Along with his supernatural diction, McCarthy’s use of that diction to dwell on the deepest questions that have troubled the West is why some critics have called him the last Great American novelist. And last because the problems which concerned him—the decline of faith, meaning, and any sense of order in the world, the powerlessness of language and culture to stop it, the imminent shadow of death due to technology or some other catastrophe—suggest the West was, for him and his critics, on the verge of extinction. Throughout his works, allusions to Schopenhauer and Spengler are as frequent as those to Dostoevsky.
Andrew Mayden 
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