The Library Annex

Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.

In the epilogue, a homeless and elderly Billy encounters another man and a philosophical conversation ensues centered around a dream. As I’ve read through this book, and as most people do with their lives, I seached for the meaning of the events. But McCarthy doesn’t stray into sentimentality which can make meaning more difficult to ascertain and leave the reader wanting a satisfying, resolute discovery. We long to capture the significance of these characters’ lives for our own. But these characters are making that same search for themselves; trying to understand the image drawn by the path of their lives like pictures in clouds. Perhaps this book, or the Border Trilogy overall, is less about expressing or glorifying a certain meaning, but rather the search for one.

In Cities of the Plain, John Grady Cole (All the Pretty Horses) and Billy Parham (The Crossing) unite and work together on a ranch. As the first two books detail their individual journeys into manhood, I observed how they had each changed between these times. John Grady’s character has not changed much. He still relates to horses better than people, communicates simply and honestly, and surprises those around him with his training skills. Billy, however, has grown into the cowboy archetype without much distinction from others of the same ilk. At first, this bothered me as his story in The Crossing left me wishing for him a more glorious life that would make his adolescence worth the suffering. Yet, as each man’s story resolves, one begins to understand the significance of McCarthy’s philosophy.

For John Grady, I asked myself in various ways, “What does he want? What motivates him?” Consider his kinship with horses. For him, in their behavior and how he trains them, they represent a simple sense of justice and morality. Is this why he relates to them better than people? Or is he projecting his desire for a simpler world onto their character? He wants to save Magdalena from her destitute life out of love, or out of pity, or perhaps to make the world around him more to his liking. Whatever the reason, we, the reader, sympathize with him and desire his success as if it were our own. Only the Shakepearean tragedies mirror the untimely, sad, and violent resolution to his tale.

For Billy Parham, who endures into old age living off the kindness of strangers, one can only marvel at the contrast of their lives. I would qualify them both as tragic yet in completely different ways. They each come of age in a world deteriorating around them. And as they grow, it declines.

When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain. Anyway this country aint the same. Nor anything in it.

I can only imagine the confusion wrought by these opposite paths of youth and the world.

Furthermore, McCarthy introduces duality through an analogy of a horse’s two brains and the challenges – or insights – this brings to training a horse. One brain may understand their training, know their master, and react accordingly to the world, while the other side can exhibit an entirely different animal without the same knowledge. Perhaps this duality applies to John Grady and Billy; two men of the same world and time who live diferent events with individual narratives intersecting in the same story.

Billy’s conversation with the drifter in the epilogue – who may be McCarthy himself – directly guides the reader on how to make sense of these stories and characters.

These dreams reveal the wolrd also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them in the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.

Should we the reader take this advice in how we understand and find meaning in this trilogy? What kind of narrative can we build around events – either in our own lives or in these books – that seem so meaningless? Even though these characters and these stories are but dreams to us – the readers – we must acknoledge our role as the dreamer and what we bring to the story. In the same way that John Grady and Billy Parham try to.