The first chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Stella Maris’

The first chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris (Picador, 2022) is written as an exquisitely crafted dialogue consisting primarily of a series of existential cries that have been fashioned into a prose poem. It is all at once poetry, prose, dialogue and drama. Anguish and elevation. Interiority and exploration.

Ponder the following: “As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared… Ultimately you will accept your life whether you understand it or not… You finally figure out that the world does not have you in mind… The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy… I think your experience of the world is largely a shoring up against the unpleasant truth that the world doesnt know you’re here…The alternative to being here is not being here… How many people if they could snap their fingers and vanish would do so?… There must be some epiphany that makes it possible for even the dullest and most deluded of us to accept not only what is unacceptable but unimaginable… What is here that we don’t know about we don’t know about…”