The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

It's been so long since I've read Cormac McCarthy and I'd forgotten how exceptional he is. The contrast between the spare, terse dialogue and his sweeping poetic descriptions of bleeding red sunsets, graveyard mesas, and bleached pueblos from the end of the world is special and his kinship with Faulkner, obvious. All The Pretty Horses is bleak, not inhumanely so like Blood Meridian, but in a more mundane way. McCarthy's cynicism about his fellow man is undeniable. Men, he sees, as fallen creatures and evil an indefatigable force. We must learn to appreciate beauty and kindness, when and where they exist, because otherwise life is little more than a living hell. John Grady Cole's coming of age is brutal; a forced acquaintance with all that is "cold and soulless" in the world. His idealism, be that about love or the myths of the American West, slowly dry in the unforgiving environment of Northern Mexico. He does what he has to do to survive. On balance, he may be a good man, he's certainly a broken one, but above all he's a survivor and this, like all McCarthy's books, is a reminder of the unpredictability, the arbitrariness, the rotten circumstances, capable of derailing lives.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.