W.S. Merwin

1 post

The Road: One must always pretend something among the dying.

I’m probably reading far too much into this book, but it seems to invite such scrutiny. Its emotional impact is blunt, yet strangely reassuring. At its heart, this is a story of a man’s love for his son, but McCarthy has chosen the most adversarial setting possible.

Mixed in through the text are odd words and turns of phrase, some of which seem random or invented. The one that stands out most, however, is “salitter.”

I knew I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t place it. Turns out, it was used by Jakob Böhme in his 1612 book Aurora to describe the “substance of God.”