A World Inhabited by Evil but Not Deserted by Hope
A dialogue with Martina Saltamacchia and Stash Grawonski - West Coast Meeting
Moderator: Good evening, everyone, and thank you for being here with us on this fourth day of the West Coast Meeting 2025. I thank those present for this testament to your loyalty: it’s hot, it’s Saturday, June 28th, and instead of going to the beach, you’ve come here to participate in this meeting. Thank you to those who are here with us and also to the many who are connected from home. Thank you all.
The title of tonight's meeting is "A World Inhabited by Evil but Not Deserted by Hope." Tonight, we will talk about America, and we will do so through the work of one of the most significant contemporary writers on the American literary scene: Cormac McCarthy, who recently passed away. We will talk more about this later at the 9 p.m. meeting with Rampini, but let's start exploring the theme now.
This meeting came about, first of all, because I attended a conference on Cormac McCarthy at the Rimini Meeting last year with the same speakers as tonight, and I was very impressed. At the time, I didn't know McCarthy. Furthermore, I believe this author offers important food for thought, bringing to light issues crucial to our times. Tonight, we will let him speak for himself by reading excerpts from his various works, and we will explore these topical issues through his writing.
We have with us two distinguished guests, two dear friends. Let me introduce Martina Saltamacchia, a professor of medieval history at the University of Nebraska. Please take a seat, Martina. Thank you for being with us because, as I just said, you've come from Nebraska; it's not exactly like coming from Albenga—it's quite a journey to get here. So, thank you very much for coming. We also have with us Stanisław “Stas” Gawronski, a professor at LUMSA University in Rome. Stash has also come from Rome; thank you for being here. Giovanni Bruno will be assisting me in moderating the discussion.
So, let's get started right away. As we were saying, we would like to highlight some central issues in Cormac McCarthy's work. The title itself, in my opinion, is significant. It speaks of evil and ties in with the theme of our meeting, “What Hell Is Not.” The theme of evil and pain emerges strongly, but so does the promise of a world not devoid of hope.
The first issue I would like to address, which emerges from much modern American literature, is the theme of travel. And the first question I ask you is this: When I was in high school, I became fascinated with the writers of the American Beat Generation—people like Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, of course, Jack Kerouac. The title of Kerouac's masterpiece, On the Road, is reminiscent of the title of one of McCarthy's masterpieces, The Road. In his book, Kerouac is at the beginning of a journey between the East of his youth and the West of his future, from New York to California. This idea of traveling across America, evoking the frontier of the pioneers, is a recurring theme. At the beginning of this journey, Kerouac, a young writer, says he wants to go far away: “I knew that at some point on that trip there would be girls, visions, everything. I knew that at some point on that trip I would receive the pearl.”
My question for you, then, is this: Is the theme of the road and travel in McCarthy the same as in Kerouac? Or is this just a superficial similarity, with the two concepts being profoundly different?
Stas Gawronski: That's an important question because there's travel and there's travel, and Kerouac's journey is not Cormac McCarthy's journey. I belong to a generation that grew up with the myth of Kerouac’s “road,” and I remember that we were fascinated by those characters who exuded an unbridled vitality. They were insatiable figures, hungry for sensations, experiences, and moments, and this captivated us. At the same time, however, we were disoriented by the fact that this journey seemed to be an end in itself. It's as if Kerouac's characters always remained on the crest of the wave: imagine a surfer who, once he reaches the shore, starts again immediately without ever going deep. Kerouac's characters are a bit like that, always stuck at the starting line, constantly restarting.
The journey of McCarthy's characters, on the other hand, is radically marked by desire. Their journey arises from the center of their being, and their insatiability is directed toward the essential. They cross territories, and the world pulsates around them like a womb that gradually gives birth to them. As a result, the reader has the sensation of a gestation in progress: the character is experiencing a labor that will lead him to the goal his heart desires. In this sense, I would like to read the first passage of the evening, because we want McCarthy's words to strike you. The protagonists are two boys, two young horsemen traveling from Texas to Mexico.
The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
Martina Saltamacchia: I'll jump right back in to highlight a couple of fascinating points in the passage we just read. First of all, I'd like to give you a key to understanding all the texts that follow. Don't worry if you've never read McCarthy or if you can't follow the plots; one of the most beautiful discoveries in reading him is that his numerous novels are, in reality, one big story. We realized this a couple of years ago when a group of friends started reading him. Each of us read a different novel, and then, every two weeks, we would discuss the pages that had struck us most and read them to each other. Every time, we were amazed at how each passage resonated with the others, how each story illuminated and clarified the pages of the others. This happens because it is a single story with a single protagonist: man. So just let yourself be struck by the evocative power and echo of these words.
In the passage we heard, the two boys, John and his friend Lacey, run away. John, aged 14, has a great passion for horses and has discovered that, after the death of his grandfather, his family has decided to sell the ranch and all the animals. Faced with this prospect, he convinces his friend, and at night, they steal two horses to begin the journey of which we heard the first fragment.
Every word in McCarthy's writing is precise. He is a painter of landscapes, but he also describes the inner environment in which his characters move. For example, at the beginning of the passage, we read: “The leather creaked in the morning cold.” Leather, something totally inanimate, is described as if it were full of life. In McCarthy, everything—the stones, the landscape, the trees—explodes with vitality. Moreover, “creaked” is a precise word; it is the sound fire makes. And so, from one of his very first books, we find the recurring theme of a mysterious inner fire.
The boys ride under a black sky, but what remains etched in our minds is not the absolute darkness. It is a blackness unimaginable to us Europeans, that of the prairie where I am from: an endless, flat land with no trees or mountains to break the darkness. Yet, within this sky, McCarthy fixes his gaze on the stars, which are not distant, motionless points. The original English text is even more poetic: it says that the stars “swarmed” around them, like a swarm of bees or a group of fireflies. It is an image of nature becoming a companion, surrounding and accompanying them on their journey.
Finally, another recurring theme emerges: the “tenantless night.” This emptiness reflects what we sometimes perceive in the world or in our lives. Yet something happens: “a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was.” Even where everything seems dark, the echo of a promise arrives, the memory of something that existed. This is how they set out on their journey. The last line reads: “loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.” This image of freedom—the ten thousand worlds to choose from—is the exact opposite of another famous McCarthy scenario. Those of you who have seen the Coen brothers' film No Country for Old Men will remember the coin toss scene with Anton Chigurh. He, the personification of evil, entrusts the decision to kill or save his victims to the toss of a coin. He is a slave to chance, a prisoner of circumstances. The boys, on the other hand, rush forward with an explosive taste for freedom, chasing the promise they hear echoing in their ears.
Moderator: Just to be sure I understand, let me return to the question of the journey. So, if I understand correctly, while in Kerouac we find pure vitalism, as you mentioned, in McCarthy there is a search for meaning. Am I right?
Stas Gawronski: Absolutely. There is a search for treasure, something worth risking everything for. McCarthy's characters, in this sense, are radical: if they leave, if they set out on a journey and cross the border, it is because they are following a deep desire. Inside them, there is a promise that guides and gives direction to their journey. The problem with Kerouac's characters is that their journey has no direction, and for McCarthy, this is evil: walking through the world without a desire, without a guiding star to show you the way.
Moderator : On this subject, I would like to ask you something because the theme of travel has really stimulated me. It brings to mind The Passenger, a novel that is entirely about a journey. The protagonist goes everywhere: he searches for things and people, and he flees from others. But, in addition to traveling on the surface, his job is that of a diver: a man who also travels in depth. This ties in with what you were saying earlier: that McCarthy's entire body of work can be seen as a single corpus, a bit like the Bible, which recounts the journey of the people of Israel with God. My question is: who is the protagonist of this ‘great story’ of McCarthy? Who is this traveler, and what is the real reason he sets out on his journey?
Martina Saltamacchia: The easiest way to answer this question is to use a word that McCarthy himself invented: “ardent heart.” McCarthy loves to work with language and create new terms, and this word encapsulates the essence of his traveler. There is a passage, referring to John, the horse boy, which says: "What he loved in horses was the same thing he loved in men: the blood and the warmth of the blood that animated them. All his esteem, his sympathy, his inclinations went to ardent hearts. That was how he was and always would be."
The McCarthy protagonist, therefore, is a man who senses the promise of something, feels the crackling of an inner flame, and for this reason, sets out on a journey. He leaves and puts himself on the line, whether by stealing horses or chasing whatever, at any given moment, seems to embody the echo of the promise he seeks. Another key character in this sense is Billy, who, however, does not encounter horses but wolves.
Stas Gawronski: Here's Billy: “On a winter's night in that first year, he woke to hear wolves in the low hills to the west of the house, and he knew that they would be coming out onto the plain in the new snow to run the antelope in the moonlight.
He pulled his breeches off the footboard of the bed and got his shirt and his blanket-lined ducking coat and got his boots from under the bed and went out to the kitchen and dressed in the dark by the faint warmth of the stove and held the boots to the windowlight to pair them left and right and pulled them on and rose and went to the kitchen door and stepped out and closed the door behind him. When he passed the barn, the horses whimpered softly to him in the cold.
The snow creaked under his boots and his breath smoked in the bluish light. An hour later, he was crouched in the snow in the dry creekbed where he knew the wolves had been using by their tracks in the sand of the washes, by their tracks in the snow.
They were already out on the plain, and when he crossed the gravel fan where the creek ran south into the valley, he could see where they had crossed before him. He went forward on his knees and elbows with his hands pulled back into his sleeves to keep them out of the snow, and when he reached the last of the small dark juniper trees where the broad valley ran under the Animas Peaks, he crouched quietly to steady his breath and then raised himself slowly and looked out.
They were running on the plain harrying the antelope, and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled, and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight, and their breath smoked pale in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire, and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entirely.
They moved down the valley and turned and moved far out on the plain until they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and then they disappeared. He was very cold.
He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time.
Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again. There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath.
He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn't tell him where he'd been nor what he'd seen. He never told anybody.
Here, the heart burns because there is an encounter. The encounter with mystery takes place here, in the meeting between Billy and the pack of wolves, in an exchange of glances. They look into each other's eyes, and something happens that will change the character's life forever. It is this encounter that makes him, from that moment on, a “hunter of the divine.” He sets out on the trail of the wolves and tries to capture them, particularly one female wolf. This is his first temptation: to think he can possess the mystery by capturing the animal. But we'll talk about that later.
Moderator: Another theme present throughout McCarthy's literature is the frontier, which is a real and symbolic place fundamental to American culture. But for McCarthy, what does the frontier represent, and why is it so important?
Stas Gawronski: The frontier is a threshold that the “divine hunter” must cross. In McCarthy's novels, it is a specific physical place—the border between Mexico and the United States—but it is above all a symbol: the frontier between the visible and the invisible. The traveler who wants to find the treasure must go beyond his land, crossing that border toward which the promise in his heart is pointing. When you cross this frontier, you truly enter the realm of possibility; if you take a step toward the mystery, anything can happen. The consequences, as we know from our own lives, are unpredictable, provided you cross that border.
An extraordinary gesture, born of this promise, is to carve a stone trough. It is the same one that Sheriff Bell, in the novel No Country for Old Men, finds himself contemplating one day, as a sign of that journey into mystery.
Where you went out the back door of that house there was a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house. A galvanized pipe came off the roof and the trough stayed pretty much full and I remember stopping there one time and squatting down and looking at it and I got to thinking about it. I don't know how long it had been there.
A hundred years. Two hundred. You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewn out of solid rock and it was about six feet long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinking about the man who did that.
That country hadn't had a time of peace of any length that I knew of. I've read a little of the history of it since and I'm not sure it ever had one. But this man had sat down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothing would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose.
He had to know better than that. I've thought about it a good deal. I thought about it after I left there with that house blown to pieces. I'm going to say that water trough is still there. It would have taken something to move it, I can tell you that. So I think about him sitting there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just an hour or two after supper, I don't know. And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I have no intention of carving a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.
Martina Saltamacchia: Speaking of this promise, the character who perhaps embodies it most lyrically is Alicia Western, the protagonist of McCarthy's last two books, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
The two novels are linked: one features her brother, Bobby, and the other his sister, Alicia. Alicia is a twenty-year-old girl, an absolute genius with an incredible perception of reality, but she is also schizophrenic. The second book, Stella Maris, is entirely a transcript of the dialogues between her and her psychiatrist.
From these dialogues emerges her fundamental question, the promise that pushes her beyond the frontier: “Is there someone who cares about me? Who will defend me after death? Is there someone who loves me?” She seeks an answer in a non-sentimental, radical way. Her real question is: Is the sky empty, or is there someone who wanted me here?
This is why she is passionate about mathematics and music, universal languages that were not invented but discovered and codified by humans. She is fascinated by the idea that they suggest something precedes us. In fact, she says that at first, she liked solving equations, until one day her father, a great mathematician, showed her how he did them. “At that moment,” she says, “I realized that they weren't just equations: they were metaphors.”
Moderator: Because they were metaphors.
Martina Saltamacchia: Yes, she uses that word, almost in passing, but for her, it is a sign of something else. It's not just that number or that note; it's as if that note draws from deep within, carrying with it the echo of a universal language. McCarthy himself was fascinated by this theme, to the point of collaborating with a world-renowned scholar of whale language, driven by a desire to understand if something universal exists—not created by us, but manifesting as an unexpected, pre-existing reality.
Now we're going to listen to a piece that really brings out Alicia's personality. As I said, she's passionate about math and music. At one point, as we'll hear, she and her brother inherit a huge sum of money for the 1980s—$500,000—and she decides to spend her entire share on an Amati, a very rare 17th-century violin, one of the very first ever made.
(Reading - Dialogue from Stella Maris)
Stas Gawronski: This is a dialogue between her and her psychiatrist.
"When you arrived here you had quite a lot of money." "Not that much. My brother and I had inherited money from our paternal grandmother. When he gave me my share there wasn't really anything that I wanted.
So I bought this rather extraordinary Amati. I knew the instrument. I'd seen it in two books and of course in the Christie's catalog. The last time it was sold was in 1863 and I figured it wouldn't be coming on the market again anytime soon."
"A violin." "Yes." "How expensive a violin are we talking about?" "I paid a little over two hundred thousand dollars for it." "That's impressive. How much money did you inherit?" "My share was something over half a million dollars. I thought the violin was a good idea. Even if I did worry about leaving it in my room. I used to keep it under my pillow. For a while I actually kept the money in a shoebox in the closet."
"You had the money in cash?" "Yes. When my brother found out he made me rent a safe deposit box." "You didn't consider investing it?" "We'd inherited the money and we didn't owe any taxes on it. But we couldn't prove that. It was buried in my grandmother's basement. She told us where it was and that we were to have it. But of course there wasn't any documentation for it."
"She'd buried the money in her basement." "Our grandfather had. It was in twenty dollar gold pieces. Stacked in lengths of lead pipe." "This is turning into a fairly curious tale." "People do curious things." "Christie's. You bought the violin at auction?" "Yes. I bought it through Bein & Fushi.
In Chicago. They weren't even really in business yet. But they acted as my agents. They wouldn't have had an instrument like that in stock." "No. They didn't have any stock. They were a brand-new company. I can see how you would be concerned about it. When a Cremona is stolen, it can be stolen forever.
One more of a handful that might never be found. I'd thought about painting it. Some sort of water-soluble paint that would be easy to get off without damaging the finish. Paint it gold, maybe. Put it in a cheap case. But I thought about the quotation that Quine cites. Save the surface and you save all. Anyway, I knew I couldn't bring myself to do it." "Who's Quine?" "He's a philosopher. Some say the greatest living." "Do you?"
"Maybe. Of course he thinks he understands mathematics. Can't seem to leave it alone." "But that's a quote, you said." "Yes. It's in the frontispiece of one of his books." "Does he give an attribution?" "Yes. Sherwin-Williams." "The paint company." "Yes." "You're joking." "No, I'm not. Neither was Quine. Well, maybe a little. Maybe quite a bit now that I think about it." "Bein & Fushi. Do I have that right?" "Yes. The day I picked it up, I took it home on the bus. I climbed the stairs to my room, went in, and sat on the bed with it in my lap.
Just looking at the case. The case was German. Probably late eighteenth century. It looked almost new. Black calf with German-silver latches. I flipped the latches up with my thumb one by one and raised the lid. I can remember every breath." "But you'd seen it before. You saw it at the dealer's." "No. I hadn't. They put it on the counter and started to unsnap the latches, but I stopped them. I'd seen photos, of course. The photos in Christie's catalog were probably the best. The maple was really close-grained and curly. The back was two-piece and almost bookmatched. Very unusual.
The finish was pretty much gone from the neck, down to the wood actually, and I thought it could even be original, although the catalog didn't say that. I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen." "You bought it sight unseen." "Yes. I went down to Bein & Fushi with the money in a shopping bag. On the bus." "Yes. When I gave them the money, they took it into the back room and counted it. They had no idea what to do with it, and the auction was in five days. You’d think you could buy things with cash, but apparently it’s not that easy anymore. They couldn’t believe I was carrying a third of a million dollars around in a shopping bag. I told them I was hiding it in plain sight, but that just seemed to confuse them." "A third of a million dollars." "Well, three hundred thousand, actually." "What did Christie's think it would sell for?" "I don't think they knew. It was such a unique piece.
They were guessing at least two hundred thousand dollars, but my guys at Bein & Fushi thought it would go for more." "But you were ready to push the whole three hundred thousand forward." "Yes. I told them to just go ahead and buy it. It would sell for what it was worth. By definition." "Yes. And so what did it go for?" "Two-thirty." "Where was the auction? In New York?" "Yes. And you told them that you didn't even want to see it." "Yes. I'm guessing that they already thought you were a bit strange." "I don't know what they thought. They got a nice commission out of it. They tried to give me a check for the remainder of the money, but I told them cash only.
Bobby's rule." "What did they say to that?" "They rolled around on the floor gurgling and calling out to one another." "All right. You didn't want to see it because you just wanted to be alone with it when you did see it." "Yes. So you took it home on the bus." "Yes. When I got home, I sat down on the bed with it in my lap and opened the case. Nothing smells like a three-hundred-year-old violin. I plucked the strings, and it was surprisingly close. I took it out of the case and sat there and tuned it. I wondered where the Italians had gotten ebony wood. For the pegs. And the fingerboard, of course. The tailpiece. I got out the bow.
It was German-made. Very nice ivory inlays. I tightened it and then I just sat there and started playing Bach's Chaconne." "The D Minor?" "I can't remember. Such a raw, haunting piece. He'd composed it for his wife who'd died while he was away. But I couldn't finish it." "Why not?" "Because I just started crying. I started crying and I couldn't stop." "Why were you crying?" "Why are you crying?" "I'm sorry. For more reasons than I could tell you. I remember blotting the tears off the spruce top of the Amati and laying it aside and going into the bathroom to splash water on my face. But it just started again.
I kept thinking of the lines: What a piece of work is a man. I couldn't stop crying. And I remember saying: What are we? Sitting there on the bed holding the Amati, which was so beautiful it hardly seemed real. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen and I couldn't understand how such a thing could even be possible."
Martina Saltamacchia: And here Alicia bursts into tears. Something happened, and she interrupts the Bach piece. In another dialogue, she explains the reasons for her tears, linked to the phrase: “What a piece of work is a man!” She was shocked by the fact that such a perfect instrument could have been created from nothing, without any previous prototypes. As she says, one day a man wakes up in Italy, goes into a forest, finds a piece of fir wood, and decides to make a violin out of it, without any previous attempts. The idea of something totally unexpected returns, something that is not simply the consequence of previous factors. This moves her because it echoes something enormous, of which man is nevertheless a part.
But there is a second level, linked to the promise that drives McCarthy's characters to set out on their journeys: they invest everything, whether stealing horses, searching for a wolf, or spending an immense amount of money on a violin. Finally, Alicia has the object in her hands, plays Bach's Chaconne—a piece of extreme virtuosity—and stops, overwhelmed by the realization that not even that, not even the most beautiful violin and music in the world, can fully satisfy the impetus of the promise that had moved her. That's when she asks herself: "What a piece of work is man! Who am I, who are we, that we can create something so perfect out of nothing and, at the same time, desire something that even the most incredible object cannot satisfy?"
Moderator: It's as if the frontier is constantly shifting further and further away.
Martina Saltamacchia: Very true. The journey always begins again, but unlike in Kerouac, where it is a circular return, in McCarthy it is a journey that deepens. Every time you touch the heart of the promise, the desire ignites even more and sets the journey in motion again.
Moderator: Exactly, like when you spend a fortune on a violin, play it, and realize that even that isn't enough. But that's not a point of descent into nihilism but a point of new beginning, which testifies to the greatness of man.
Martina Saltamacchia: The key detail is Alicia's tears. Something fundamental happens there: through her tears, Alicia reveals her own vulnerability, which is where mystery can dwell and be received. It's as if, from that moment on, Alicia is ready to receive what she has always sought. In fact, she puts the violin aside, because mystery is not found in possession.
Moderator: I'd like to ask you something else to explore this aspect of desire and promise, which in McCarthy, however, always passes through a painful journey. I am thinking of the Western siblings, Alicia and Bobby, and their relationship, which is a very strong but at the same time destructive bond. This brings out one of McCarthy's central themes: evil. It is raw evil; it strikes you in the crudeness of the scenes' descriptions, an almost morbid precision that is never an end in itself but an aspect of reality. Violence is a constant in his books, as if his characters have to go through a dark night before they can find what they are looking for. This is Alicia's journey. Why all this violence? And what, then, lies at the end of this dark night?
Stas Gawronski: Yes, certainly. But it's not morbid; it's realistic. McCarthy doesn't pull any punches: evil is described in all its rawness, but its origin is also linked to the desire for the absolute that drives his characters. What is the mistake, the temptation that leads to evil? Evil appears when man wants to possess the divine: he wants to possess the horse, the wolf, or even the violin. If you stop there, thinking you can harness the mystery through possession, you are bound to be disappointed. As he says in another passage, mystery is like a snowflake: the moment you try to grasp it, it disappears.
What happens after that disappointment? Another temptation takes over: that of nothingness. The temptation to think that there is no foundation for things, that beyond the frontier there is nothing, no promise, and that the desire we carry in our hearts is a deception. The temptation of nothingness makes man feral, ferocious. And indeed, the reality described in many of his novels is full of violence; in The Road, men end up devouring other men. It is a world annihilated, reduced to ashes, dust, and darkness.
(Reading - Dialogue from The Road)
In this environment, a father and son move about, alone, abandoned by their mother, who at some point chose nothingness. It is the father who speaks here.
“We're survivors,” he told her across the flame of the lamp. “Survivors?” she said. “Yes. What in God's name are you talking about? We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film.” “I'm begging you. I don't care. I don't care if you cry. It doesn't mean anything to me.” “Please.” “Stop it. I'm begging you. I'll do anything.” “Such as what?” “I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid.” “We've been over all of this.” “I didn't bring myself to this. I was brought here. And now I'm done. I thought about not even telling you. That would probably have been best.” “You have two bullets and then what? You can't protect us. You say you would die for us, but what good is that? I'd take him with me if it weren't for you. You know I would. It's the right thing to do.” “You're talking crazy.”
“No, I'm speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They're going to rape us and kill us and eat us, and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I can't. I can't.” She sat there smoking a slender length of dried grapevine as if it were some rare cigar. Holding it with a certain elegance, her other hand across her knees where she'd drawn them up. She watched him across the small flame. “We used to talk about death,” she said. “We don't anymore. Why is that?” “I don't know.” “It's because it's here. There's nothing left to talk about.” “I wouldn't leave you.” “I don't care. It's meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.” “Death is not a lover.” “Oh yes he is.” “Please don't do this.” “I'm sorry. I can't do it alone.” “Then don't. I can't help you.”
“They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand, but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born, so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me, my only hope is for eternal nothingness, and I hope for it with all my heart.” She was gone, and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian. He had taught her himself. Sharper than steel. The edge an atom thick. And she was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self-destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall. In the morning the boy said nothing at all and when they were packed and ready to set out upon the road he turned and looked back at their campsite and he said: She's gone isn't she? And he said: Yes, she is.
Martina Saltamacchia: And you asked why all this violence continues and what lies at the bottom of this dark night. In my opinion, the answer to this second question explains why not everyone reacts like the mother, who gives up and declares that everything is nothing. Others, like the father and son in The Road, continue to walk, even though the landscape around them is identical to what she saw. What allows them to go on? As you said, it's not a morbid taste for evil, but a way of saying, “Look, the darker the darkness, the brighter the light. The blacker the night, the more you can see the stars.” McCarthy's first gesture of friendship is to educate us, even with these raw scenes, to keep our eyes fixed on the darkness—an absolutely countercultural gesture. Why not cut this aspect of reality? Because, as he says, there is something there after all. As Alicia says in another passage: “An unfulfilled longing carries with it a legacy that its fulfillment can only dream of.”
What is this quote saying? An unfulfilled longing—like the desire for the wolf, which cannot be possessed—carries with it a legacy that its satisfaction can only dream of. We have just seen this: even after spending a fortune on the violin, that is not enough to fulfill the promise. It's like a snowflake: you look at it and it melts. But there's more. It's not simply a matter of saying that it's better to be dissatisfied than settled. Alicia uses the word “legacy.” And a legacy presupposes a father, something that has been left to us. Paradoxically, therefore, that very dissatisfaction becomes, like a distant echo of church bells, proof that we have been made a promise and that there is a father who made it. That is why it is possible to keep going, like the father and son in The Road, and to overcome evil. And that is why all things—the beautiful ones, like the Amati, and the horrible ones, like men who eat other men—become once again a sign of this promise, which drives the traveler to go ever further.
Stas Gawronski: One of the most paradoxical images is on the first page of the novel The Passenger. It is a woman who has hanged herself.
It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she'd dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures. The hunter knelt and stuck his rifle upright in the snow beside him and took off his gloves and let them fall and folded his hands one upon the other. He thought that he should pray but he had no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time.
When he opened his eyes, he saw a small shape half buried in the snow and he leaned over and dusted away the snow and picked up a gold chain that held a steel key, a white gold ring. He slipped them into the pocket of his hunting coat. He had heard the wind in the night. The wind's work. A trash can clattering over the bricks behind his house. The snow blowing out there in the forest in the dark. He looked up into those cold enameled eyes glinting blue in the weak winter light. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she'd be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.
It is Christmas Day when the hunter encounters this woman hanging from the tree. It is an image of death, but it is paradoxical because, in front of her, the hunter has the distinct perception that he is facing something sacred. Instinctively, he kneels and says a Marian prayer.
McCarthy describes the woman with her hands turned outward, like statues whose posture asks that their history and the foundations of the world be contemplated, born from the “sorrow of her creatures.” It is as if McCarthy were suggesting a posture: to stand before evil knowing that it does not have the last word because right in the heart of darkness, light is coagulated. Right at the deepest point of the abyss is the wound that is light, and that provokes this instinctive prayer in the hunter. It is the mystery—the wind, the snow—that called the hunter there, just as Billy was called by the howling of the wolves.
Moderator: We are coming to the end; we have very few minutes left. As a final note, let's read a passage from The Road and hear a few words about what fire represents for McCarthy. Stash, perhaps you could read it.
Stas Gawronski: Fire is a recurring symbol in McCarthy's fiction, but it is explicitly mentioned by the father and son in the novel The Road.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here. When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything was fading into the murk. The soft ash blew in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees.
Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then looked at the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke. They passed through towns that warned people away with messages scrawled on the billboards. The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods that no longer existed. They sat by the side of the road and ate the last of the apples. “What is it?” the man said. “Nothing.” “We'll find something to eat. We always do.” The boy didn't answer. The man watched him. “That's not it, is it?” “It's okay.” “Tell me.”
The boy looked away down the road. “I want you to tell me. It's okay.” He shook his head. “Look at me,” the man said. He turned and looked. He looked like he'd been crying. “Just tell me.” “We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?” “No. Of course not.” “Even if we were starving?” “We're starving now.” “You said we weren't.” “I said we weren't dying. I didn't say we weren't starving.” “But we wouldn't.” “No. We wouldn't.” “No matter what.” “No. No matter what.” “Because we're the good guys.” “Yes.” “And we're carrying the fire.” “And we're carrying the fire. Yes.” “Okay.”
Moderator: Martina, would you like to say something to close?
Martina Saltamacchia: This is the burning heart of McCarthy's literature. Fire, which we have seen sown as an intuition in the heart of each character, becomes explicit here. The father and son are the guardians of this fire, which is ultimately a mystery of relationship: the relationship with the Father, the echo of that promise and that legacy that all the characters sought on their journey.
What emerges from the dialogue is that the attitude Stash was talking about—contemplation—is the only thing we can do. Faced with this fire, we can only guard it and carry it forward. In itself, it remains a mystery. And I am fascinated that McCarthy does not stop at the metaphor of the snowflake; he does not simply say, “You cannot possess it because it melts.” He adds a step: to really see the snowflake, you have to look at it according to its nature. That is, you have to kneel down, like the man in the passage we read earlier, and stand in front of it.
Moderator: Thank you, because it would be nice to talk about this for a long time. Tonight, Martina and Stash have introduced us to something great—to this mystery that is always beyond and that continually calls us like an incessant voice. We really thank them for the evening they have given us.
The author have not revised the notes, its transcription, editing and translation by the staff of Epochal Change.
Source: West Coast Meeting. July 2025.