Primo Levi and Cormac McCarthy

I take some pride in finishing a book I've started to read. I don't know when or how it exactly became a point in my life, but it has surely inhabited me -- almost become an ethos. Perhaps I imbue the written word or the work of the author with too much reverence. There are certainly cases when this notion has been seriously disabused. Most of it coming from the free section of Amazon's Kindle selections, but even then I try to find something in the work or the genre or the style that I can learn from.

There was a time I couldn't finish a book. Blood Meridien by Cormac McCarthy inhabited me in a way I still fully haven't come to terms with. Perhaps it was the immensity of the prodigious art of his words wrapping around the most terrible atrocities that made it seem almost profane to me. But from the very first night, the words took hold and I slept haunted by nightmares as if the words were taking root somehow. After a few days (and I am normally a fast reader) I just couldn't continue.

Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz struck me as a similar exercise in art finding a way through horror. Perhaps in this case I have come to terms with the feelings the work engenders, perhaps it was Levi finding a way to maintain his humanity in the most dire of circumstances that helped me to turn the corner. His rawness and his poetic turns struck me as reassuring even as the horrible Nazi machine ground away against an entire race.

That he would bear witness to these crimes and still find a way to come back to a moral humanity was profoundly inspiring, although no less difficult to read at times. His determination to give names, to name the victims he could recall, was particularly poignant and struck me as an important part of his struggle against the forces that strove so hard to strip them of that humanity. "Therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness," he wrote. "No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz."

Perhaps that is what McCarthy was lacking in his work, this hope for humanity. I will sleep easier with The Canto of Ulysses in my mind. "Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance. Your mettle was not made; you were made men, to follow after knowledge and excellence."