No Country for Old Men discussion

You moved the goalposts. You went from "why would anybody" to "why don't we all, in all circumstances."

At any rate, I was discussing why we act morally. (That was your question that I quoted.) Prisoner's dilemmas, great man theories, Brutus's assassination of Caesar, speak to what actions are moral, or how we can determine what is moral. I'll grant that those are open questions.

no one said he is totally unknown, just a lot less famous and less appreciated by standard folks.

To be fair, Richard, I truly don't see the difference between "why would anybody" and "why don't we all, in all circumstances". In my view (and this is what I intended when I wrote the above), in the former, "anybody" is a placeholder for an arbitrary person. A universal quantifier, if you will. Interpreted as such, "why would anybody" becomes "For an arbitrary person x, why would x". And since I'm asking the question, it's totally reasonable to infer that I would expect x to do the opposite. In other words, "why would anybody" becomes "For an arbitrary person x, I expect that x would not". Which is damn close (in my mind, identical) to "why don't we all, in all circumstances". Precisely because of the arbitrariness built into "anybody".

If you have a different reading of the questions, fair enough. Semantics is semantics. But I truly never intended to "move the goalposts", nor do I believe that I actually did.

And Anne: I was only responding to your "I asked diverse European friends about CMC, and he is unknown." I don't particularly care about an offhand comment like that, but that point started getting discussed in the thread, and I wanted to toss in my two cents. Surely he is far from a household name. All I was saying was that a lot of serious people (namely, professors and literary critics) from various places take him very seriously.

"Why would anybody paint a duck?" Surely "anybody" is existential, not universal. One reason why one person would paint a duck would satisfy.

Only you can know what you meant, of course.

So if you are a non-believer who thinks that morality comes only from revealed Truth, do you think of yourself as amoral?

Richard,

The question is rhetorical. I'm not actually asking for a reason why someone would do that. "Why would..." implies an expectation of the negation. As such, it is easy to reformulate it to have either a universal or existential quantifier. This is just DeMorgan: The rhetorical "Why would anybody do y?" is equivalent to both "I expect that for any person x, x would not do y" and "I expect that there does not exist a person x who would do y."

But this is tediousness. As for your last, much more interesting (to me) question: I don't know. This is why McCarthy's (and Dostoevsky's, and Melville's, inter aliorum) stuff appeals to me so much. I *do* consider myself a moral person, but I don't understand *why* I am so. To take an example, if I ever were walking alone at night and came upon an obviously physically weak person displaying a bunch of jewelry/a nice car/you name it, I know that I would not harm that person. But like Kierkegaard's man on a cliff, I fully recognize my unfettered condition, that I have the potential to deviate from that inclination. And I don't fully understand my own actions. And a lot of this tension is what I see in McCarthy. His older stuff, at least. In his later stuff he seems to have settled on the religious tine in this fork. And I'm very interested in what he has to say on the matter.

I loved this book. Makes me sorry I ever learned to use quotation marks and kings English. I only wish I had learned to write from McCarthy. The story flows beautifully. If brevity is the soul of wit punctuation just gets in the way. As for the point of the book, they are there but maybe you just need to have been there. I worked that part of the country and know the people. His larger point is that it is no country for old men. Never was. I have met my share of psychopaths and people of honor--people who make good judgments and people who make bad choices. And what does God have to do with it? Just look at Vietnam.
Life creeps on--there are people who live by a good code, and those whose code makes no sense to ordinary people. I have met Chigurh in many guises--his code is interesting because there is a twisted logic to it. The banker who gets his bonus because you will lose your home, the soldier who will shoot you to prove a point to himself, and the guy who believes you just needed killing. One memorable line (not without humor) was that the drug runner dies of natural causes--natural considering the line of work he was in. McCarthy has a larger point. It is a violent world, old men come to understand that it is run by people with flexible moral principles and by madmen as well. The trouble with growing old is that you come to understand chaos and change--and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.

Laura wrote: "I have twenty pages to go and I'm still trying to figure out what this book has to say except that we live in a violent world where the good guy abd the bad guy don't always get to face off in the ..."

don't take this as a shot to you, because everyone likes different things, but i'm going to guess you're the type of English teacher i hope my future children don't have, because i know you wouldn't have much of an effect on me had i had you as a teacher in highschool.

writing rules are there as a sort of guideline, and most people should follow them, at least until they've developed a voice and have established their writing and story-telling.