Good Advice from a Bad Guy?

"You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?"

So says Anton Chigurh, the chilling, pseudo angel of death nihilist that haunts the pages of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. He says this right before killing the possibly most innocent character in the book, killing her for some logical reason completely disconnected from her. Killing her after conceding to the fairness of a coin toss, which she loses.

Killing her. But not before responding to her pleas of how things could have been different. Pleas which are meant to challenge Chigurh to alter his course, to reconsider, to deliberate. To choose a different path.

There is no other path. There is this path.

But you have the power to move elsewhere. To do something else.

No. This is how the world is. This is reality.

Nuh uh.

Yeah huh.



I want to side-step the metaphysics here. Messy, those. I want to instead focus attention on this unwavering view of the actual world as it actually exists. Who among us possesses the ability to take this view, this absolutist stance?

It would be ludicrous, gentle reader, to tackle the idea of defining reality in this tiny little blog. So let us consider the moral toughness, the grit that is required to look upon your life, to set down all the things that you wish were there, that you had expected to be there, that ought to be there, and see what actually is. What kind of discipline does that take? What kind of self-effacing humor? What kind of potential shame?

Chigurh is a psychopath. But the method to his madness allows me to examine my own fortitude, my level of stick-to-it-ness, under the most extreme literary microscope, and from a safe distance. I can put the book down at any time, and Chigurh isn't killing real people. But his commitment is real. To his Ideal. To Himself. To a true, unbiased, uncomplicated version of his World.

Good advice from a bad guy? I'll say yes. With the qualifier that I want to better apply such an absolutist view to the world. Sing walls says Beowulf to Grendel as he plows his head into the wall. Sing of the hardness of walls. The walls exist. And they are hard. And I want to be able to acknowledge both whether I am Beowulf or Grendel. Whether they help me or hurt me. Whether I want to or not.

Virtue exists in such moments.