Reading Cormac McCarthy

I'm reading McCarthy's The Road while on a road trip with my family. McCarthy's prose here is achingly sparse, populated by lament and loss and the too-long onlingering of things. It reminds me of some work I've done before, specifically this one:

Somnambulist

We are walking wide-awake

we waking dead

Move across these landscape features

Across these stone foundations in the ground

These monoliths with a muted gaze

we pass.

At the turret we'll turn left

--Highway Sixty--

Before we forget the exit sounds

and all these things are gone

They will be gone amid dead cities

They will be gone amid the ash

of Apocalyptic visions

And ruinous--what is it--

Machinations

This is not the genre of the end

no Simple eschatology for the learning class.

We're looking at the sudden close of things,

The unwarned muting of color and sight

and physical approximations of forms

You say you want a recount,

A sad reckoning for the innocent.

That is the story of life

and what it's all about

Sometimes you just have to go; dissolve into

the hazy dream, the half-lit fire, leap

Atop the flat platforms of perfumed life

and go.

The welcome end! The world dissolved!

Not in Storm and fire but like a light

switch thrown, suddenly dark.

All innumerable patterns broken into elements

Everything at its own center Every

Flaw and perfection recognizing

its own heart.

This is the day

This is the reconciliation and the life

All the work was worth it, all the

indolence worth it,

Now we're waking up.