Blood Meridian

[John Bailey]

Such a memorable and cryptic ending. I remember taking it as a kind of
image of The Judge as this terrible eternal fool character leading us
idiots off into the future. The key word is progress for me - under the
rubric of reason and science and technological advancement he weaves this
spell that has mortals bewitched but what he's really doing is as inane as
digging pointless potholes. The book offers us no alternative it would be
preferable to follow, either.
What a bastard!

On 4 Jun 2017 10:27 AM, "jesse gooch" <jlguuch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just finished rereading Blood Meridian and wondered if anyone had any
> thoughts on the epilogue. Every time I finish the book I have to read it a
> few times, shrug, and then accept that it will continue to elude me.
>
> "In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes
> which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and
> he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his
> steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put
> there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and
> those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like
> mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that
> they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner
> reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes
> that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit
> of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of
> sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence
> to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the
> gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole
> and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again."
>
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