Post-Pandemic Post
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter. – Mark Twain
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To Huff, this transformation helped explain the resurgent nostalgia for the Confederacy he sensed across the South, even among his mostly affluent students. “The South - the white South - has always had this powerful sense of loss,” he said, as we chatted in his office between classes. First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth. Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.“ – Confederates in the Attic
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The boy watched him. You aint got no business smokin them things, he said.
His father pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the table and looked up. When I come around askin you what I’m supposed to do you’ll know you’re big enough to tell me, he said. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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Rawlins took a cigarette out of his shirtpocket and sat up and took a coal
from the fire and lit the cigarette. He sat smoking. I wouldnt let her get
the best of me, he said.
He tipped the ash from the end of the cigarette against the heel of his boot.
She aint worth it. None of em are.
He didnt answer for a while. Then he said: Yes they are.
– Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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I’m goin to tell you somethin, cousin. John Grady leaned and spat. All right. Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it. You understand what I’m sayin? – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses %
In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself. When I look at my grandniece I see a child. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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He sat and smoked with them and told all that had happened. They were concerned about Rawlins, more a friend to them than he. They were saddened that he was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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He saw very clearly how all his life had led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe it would ever leave. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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STRESS MANAGEMENT
Picture yourself near a stream. Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air. Nothing can bother you here. No one knows this secret place. You are in total seclusion from that place called the world. The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity. The water is crystal clear. You can easily make out the face of the person whose head you’re holding under the water. – KevinT
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