The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, translated by J.A. Underwood

    I don't usually include essays on here, but I read this as a way to kick off a unit on media studies. It was a little tough to understand, but a very thought-provoking piece written in the mid-1930s about how photography, film, and recorded sound were changing the nature of art at that time. I think it is extremely interesting to read today, as the internet and social media continue to change the nature of art in such different ways. The essay is densely packed with important ideas that I'll discuss below.

    Aura refers to the uniqueness of art in its place and sort of its genuineness, as I understand it. So, something that "art" needs to deal with in the age of mechanical reproduction is that when a photo is printed twenty times, no individual print is more "genuine" than the others, whereas a great painting, copied by another artist, retains an aura of authenticity. Art was also originally "embedded in the context of tradition" through worship. So, art wasn't always for another person's viewing. Art originated to fulfill spiritual needs. A caveman drawing an elk on the wall might show it to his friends, but he also expected that spirits might see it. Or a medieval craftsman carving details high up on a cathedral would know that no passerby would see them, but that God would. With the advent of perfectly reproduceable art, with no "aura" to distinguish the original or the genuine piece, art is thrown into a crisis, illustrated by disputes about whether or not photography is art. But, writes Benjamin, the question is not whether photography is art, but how it changes the nature of art. In the modern era, writes Benjamin, art is underpinned not by ritual, as in the past, but by politics.

    Religious art was viewed for the purposes of provoking a spiritual experience, and therefore was not to be taken lightly. Statues of the Madonna, for example, would only be revealed at certain times, and some works of art were only allowed to be seen by certain people, like the Ark of the Covenant. But with religious ritual removed from art, opportunities for displaying art proliferated. 

    Benjamin writes that fascism allows the masses to express themselves through the spectacle without actually having their needs or wants addressed. The mass protest or rally is best captured through photography, and especially in the bird's eye view, which normal people rarely experience. With the advent of aerial photography, or just tall enough buildings, it makes more sense to hold mass rallies and have them photographed to show the popularity of certain ideas. Moreover, fascism seeks to grant the masses a spectacle to serve as a sort of distraction from real needs. It uses art as a way to divert attention. Communism, on the other hand, rather than aestheticising politics, politicizes aesthetics. Benjamin doesn't elaborate too much on that, but I take it to mean that Communists instead assert control over artistic media to turn them into propaganda.

    One thing that Benjamin notes in a footnote is from Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay, in which Huxley uses some rough math to assert that there is a proliferation of art in the modern era, but that the bad art has increased more than the good art. The media have allowed for the creation of more art, but only allowed for a creation of talented people to a lesser extent. I am not sure that is true. In my experience the current era (90ish years later) is full of bad and good art, but above all is characterized by individual art. Art is so commodified now that we don't even refer to people as artists so much as they are "content creators." We have sort of tacitly acknowledged that whatever it is people are doing on Vine, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. is not art, but "content." However, it is getting more reach than art ever was. It is normal for a ten second video made by some random person to get millions of views--this happens to different videos every day. More people are seeing this "content" than ever saw the Mona Lisa for the first hundred years after it was painted. So this "content" is going to be more influential than any "art" ever was. I think that has changed the nature of art. Whereas photography forced the world to expand the definition of art, social media has narrowed the definition, turning art into something more purposeful and thought provoking, and separating mere diversion into a separate category of content for the masses. 

    When we watch this "content," I would say most people are of the opinion that we are not doing ourselves any favors. You hear people call it rotting, or refer to it as screen time, which we use apps on our phones to try to diminish. People try to keep their kids from having too much screen time, which usually doesn't even refer to TVs but just to social media and games on smartphones and tablets. But it is so attractive, like junk food but for attention. What will the result be? I think the aggregate result of the proliferation of accessible information consumption and creation will be more trash creation and consumption in the short term, but over decades, people are becoming more knowledgeable, getting good and bad information the would have never had before. Now, the problem is not being uninformed, but misinformed. We can take for granted that there is now a constant stream of information being consumed by billions of people all the time through their social media.

    I wonder whether AI will alter this trend. Before AI, the trend for information was for a reduction in the influence of experts and an increase in the amount of non-experts' influence. Knowledge was becoming decentralized--anyone could create a video or a post and have it go viral, and the cause of virality was rarely whether the information provided was true or thoughtful, but whether it spawned engagement. To go viral, a post only needs to get engagement, which it can get by being entertaining, outrageously wrong, controversial, or extremely negative. However, with AI, I wonder whether people will just turn to asking Claude or ChatGPT their important questions about history, science, etc., and therefore we would see a return to the influence of experts whose data was harvested by LLMs. 

    Maybe AI will lead to a divergence in knowledge or information like "content creation" has split art from content. People will use AI seemingly more like they would use a Google search, and consume content more for entertainment purposes. But maybe that entertainment will also misinform people who will never actually consult their AI tools for an answer. The result then would just be more general misinformation and an overall lowering of the quality of information, as the creators of content become the ones in control over public knowledge. This democratization probably leads to a flattening of knowledge. With experts unable to serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, more information and misinformation spreads around, bringing up the general knowledge level of the people who were the least informed while reducing the knowledge level of those who were most informed. Now that you can find anyone on the internet to agree with you on any given thing, people can connect with each other over shared interests, but those connections are mediated by machines. Like how Benjamin talks about the actor and the audience versus the actor and the camera and the audience, the more people will socialize through the internet, the more that real-life connections will diminish. We will end up adapting to an "internet society," and lose physical connections. 

    I think that this will also lead to a flattening of the quality of communication. In-person communication is the most effective way to communicate. It would be at the top of a metaphorical ladder, followed by videochatting, phone calls, emails, etc. When people can communicate through other media more, that increases the amount of total communication, but it also transfers some part of the real-life communication to a lower form of communication. So communication is increased, but high-quality communication is somewhat diminished. With everything getting flatter, our social structures will probably also get more democratic. It will be harder for "experts" or the rich or the powerful to rule over a population that is better informed than they were before because the top 10% of society will also be worse informed than they were before. It will be harder for people in the halls of power to rule over the people who aren't because people will have fewer conversations in those halls of power while people outside will have more communication with one another through media. Those forms of communication, which can be forms of organization, will flatten power relationships as the upper rungs of society diminish in the qualities that make them the upper rungs of society while the bottom rungs get access to the same sources of information and means of communication they have.

    Okay, that was a big rant that I wrote out all at once. No clue if it makes sense. Not reading it back, but clicking "publish."

Games Criminals Play: How You Can Profit by Knowing them by Bud Allen and Diana Bosta

    This was a pretty interesting book all about lessons that should be learned if you are ever going to work in a prison. I don't plan on doing that, but in the criminal justice system, many people become prisoners, so it's interesting to read about. The book mainly talks about schemes that prisoners use to try to "down a duck," which I guess is 80's terminology for finding a correctional officer to manipulate into bringing contraband into the prison. Mostly, the lessons are to keep things professional, and to keep things in the open. No secrets. Interesting book, but it felt a little dated in its terminology and language.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

    Bloodlands is an important book, and Timothy Snyder obviously knew it was important when he was writing it. The book contextualizes the Holocaust, WWII, and the Great Purge in the USSR to show how the same people perpetrated and suffered from the same horrors in the "Bloodlands," roughly the area stretching from the older version of Poland up through the Baltics to Tallinn and Petrograd/St. Petersburg, and East through Ukraine. Today, It's mainly Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, with some of Russia. This is the region where, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, people had to choose between Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. 

    After World War One, the three powers that partitioned Poland in 1795, Austria-Hungary, Prussia/The Second German Empire, and Russia, had all collapsed, allowing Poland to re-emerge. Poland was in a weird situation since it had been ceded by Tsarist Russia to the Germans, but then the Germans fell, and it came under threat from revolutionary Russia. It defeated the USSR in a war from 1919-20, led by Joseph Pilsudski, and ensured its independence, whereas Ukraine and Belarus were conquered. But over the 1920s, Poland was destined to grow relatively weaker than Russia and Germany. There was really nothing the Poles could do. They were smaller than both countries, less technologically advanced, and also dealt with the fact that, like the Germans, they were stuck in the middle of Europe, surrounded by other states that would be happy to take pieces off of Poland. The only policy available to Polish leaders was to use alliances to obtain non-aggression pacts with their neighbors. They got one with the USSR in 1932, which allowed Stalin more room to maneuver in his own western borderlands, where he was putting down rebellion against failed agricultural collectivization and "de-kulakization" that was starving the citizens of the USSR. I noticed that in the chapter, "The Soviet Famines," Snyder gives particular attention to Ukraine, without using the term Holodomor. I'm interested in that because it shows a sort of dissenting position against what had been official Ukrainian rhetoric on Stalin's starvation policies, while also paying particular attention to Ukraine. In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin specifically argued that Ukraine was not particularly targeted by collectivization, and that per capita deaths were actually higher in Kazakhstan than in Ukraine. However, since Snyder focuses on the "Bloodlands" that do not include Kazakhstan, and since Ukraine had the highest number of total deaths, I think his focus still makes sense.

    As collectivization ended and Stalin began the Great Purge, to find people to blame for the millions of failures of collectivization, the Nazis took power and opened the first concentration camps, which primarily focused on killing the physically and mentally handicapped. They opened camps at Dachau and Lichtenberg in 1933, Sachsenhausen in 1936, Buchenwald in 1937, and Flossenberg in 1938. When taking relative populations sizes into account, the Soviet Gulag system was still 25 times bigger than the German concentration camp system at this point. The Nazis were nowhere close. What becomes clear is that the two terrors of Stalinism and Nazism differed in their approach. Stalinist terror was at its worst in peacetime, when he had total control of his people. Hitler's terror was worst in wartime, when expediency created a twisted logic of killing, in which it made sense to enact the Final Solution during, not after the war. These opposite approaches to killing are illustrated by the fact that in 1937 and 1938, 267 people were sentenced to death in Germany, whereas 378,326 were sentenced to death in the kulak operation alone in the Soviet Union. The USSR's killing was more legalistic than the Nazi killing. But like Nazi terror, Stalinst terror was largely national. Chapter 2 of the book largely focuses on anti-Ukrainian terror and chapter 3 on anti-Polish terror.

    When the Germans invaded Poland, they invaded the most Jewish country in the world, and added massive numbers of Jews to their empire. He tripled the number of Jews in Germany from a little over 330,000 to nearly a million, and if you counted the Jews of the occupied General Government, there were another 1.5 million Jews. Lodz alone had 233,000 Jews, more than Berlin (82,788) and Vienna (91,480) combined. Warsaw had more Jews than all of Germany combined. But the Germans weren't the only ones to invade Poland in 1939, the USSR also did so simultaneously. The Soviets quickly began a "lesser Terror," killing 21,892 Polish citizens, 8% of whom were Jews, and deporting tens of thousands more to Kazakhstan before the winter of 1939-40. In June of 1940, the Soviets deported another 78,339 people from Poland, 84% of whom were Jewish. Jews were caught in the middle of this massive clash of ideologies and empires, one of which wanted to wipe the Jewish people off the map, and the other of which wanted to erase Jewish identity from people's minds. The Poles were also caught in the middle, and the two major powers both targeted Polish leaders for destruction. Snyder writes:

In eastern Europe the pride of societies was the 'intelligentsia,' the educated classes who saw themselves as leading the nation, especially during periods of statelessness and hardship, and preserving national culture in their writing, speech, and behavior. The German language has the same word, with the same meaning; Hitler ordered quite precisely the 'extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.' ... It was the intelligentsia who was thought to embody this civilization, and to manifest this special way of thinking. [para. break] Its mass murder by the two occupiers was a tragic sign that the Polish intelligentsia had fulfilled its historical mission.

    June 22, 1941, is the beginning of the worst phase of the calamity that should really be considered as an eastern European apocalypse. On that day, the Germans invaded the USSR, and that invasion would result in tens of millions dead. Snyder points out that from 1933-38, the Soviets did almost all the killing in the Bloodlands, and that from 1939-41 it was balanced. But from 1941-45, it would be "the Germans who were responsible for almost all of the political murder."

    Germany, in World War One, tried to challenge Britain, for control of the seas. Seeing the Kaiser's failure, in World War Two, Hitler tried to challenge Russia for control of the vast lands that would become the Bloodlands. Hitler saw them as a frontier for his empire, necessary not to compete with Britain for control of Europe, but to compete with America for control of the world. If Hitler's aim had been to rule Europe, it would have been best achieved by waiting. Germany needed only to stay united to become the richest and most powerful country on the continent. But his goal was world hegemony, and he saw that the country most likely to assume world hegemony, the United States, had done it thanks to an enormous frontier that it could fill. Hitler wanted to do to the Jews and the Slavs what the Americans had done to the Native Americans, but he lacked the diseases to do so. Instead, his plan for the Final Solution began as a plan for a reservation in Eastern Poland, the Lublin Plan, which was abandoned by November 1939 as too complicated. It transformed three more times. The next was a consensual plan to send the Jews to the Soviet Union, which Stalin rejected in February 1940. Then the plan was to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but that required British cooperation, and the British fought Germany after Poland's conquest. Finally, after invading the Soviet Union, the plan became to exterminate the Jews, and then the Slavs, by starvation. By the end of 1941, no government in history had ever ruled over so many Jews as Germany. It's plans for eastward expansion to match American westward expansion a century prior required the same extermination of the people already living there, and the only plan going into the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941 was starvation. However, once Operation Barbarossa began, the Germans began an improvised extermination: first with bullets, then with vans that put exhaust back into their passenger compartments, then with stationary vans with exhaust into rooms filled with Jews, and then with gas chambers, using a pesticide known as Zyklon B.

    Under the Nazi regime, there could be three places Jews would go: ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps. Ghettos locked Jews into specific blocks of cities and could put Jews to work. They largely characterized the first year or two after the Germans invaded Poland. Concentration camps came about quickly as work camps designed to produce munitions and other goods for Germany. And death camps were extermination centers. Auschwitz was a rare combination of the two that is well known for its concentration/work camp side. Few of the death camps are well remembered because they were all liberated by the USSR, which suppressed the Jewish-specific parts of WWII historical memory, and because there were so few survivors of the death camps to tell their story (at Treblinka, only 50 survived while 780,863 were murdered). Six major facilities were established and functioned from December 1941 until November 1944: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the core of the killing was done in Operation Reinhard, gassing 1.3 million Polish Jews in 1942. It ended with Auschwitz, where two hundred thousand Polish Jews and seven hundred thousand other European Jews were gassed, mostly in 1943 and 1944. Gassing was chosen as the best way to exterminate Jews once deportation was understood to be impossible. East of Molotov-Ribbentrop, mass shooting was more common.

    One of the social phenomena that made gassing millions of Jews possible was the division of society throughout the war. Obviously, national and religious divisions were paramount, isolating Jews from Poles, Catholics from Atheists and Russian Orthodox. But within the ghettos, the Germans also made use of Jewish police forces, and divided those who could work from those who could not. This way, even after it became clear that the Germans were exterminating Jews, once already completely under the Germans' control, Jews vied to be kept alive for labor at selections. This created a social division between those Jews who had papers and those who did not. People believed that their families could remain in the ghetto with the right work papers, and much energy was spent in the hunt for the right documents instead of on resistance. In most ghettos, people wouldn't come together en masse until it was clear that the ghetto would be liquidated, and then everyone, knowing that they all shared the same fate, would rise up. But even then, ghetto uprisings were never successful in preventing a ghetto's liquidation, merely delaying liquidation a few days and merely guaranteeing a different type of mass murder on a different day.

    One really interesting aspect of this book is that, like how it combines its analysis of both German and Soviet conquest and occupation, it also extends its analysis past the Second World War. The ethnic cleansing continues as the Germans and Poles are both forced by the Soviets to the west, into a reduced Germany and a shifted Poland. For the Germans, it was new, and for the Poles, it was just a continuation of what they'd already been facing during the war. Snyder ends the books with a really interesting historiographical discussion of his influences, Hannah Arendt and Vasily Grossman, and of the errors in the popular imagination of the Holocaust. He reminds the reader that the majority of those killed never saw a gas chamber, and that Auschwitz is really primarily known due to being the furthest west of the death camps and the fact that it had a work camp attached to it, where a lot of people survived to tell their story. Now that the iron curtain has fallen, it is important to unite the "Bloodlands" into the historical understanding of the Holocaust, because that story was not well-known before the 1990s. This book is an incredibly important work in bringing that story out.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5%, whereas the death rate in POW camps for western soldiers was less than 5%.
• Snyder writes that on any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian empire.
• The Soviets paused their advance just east of the Vistula river from early August 1944 until January 1945. This doomed Polish resistance fighters and Jews alike by design. Stalin wanted the Polish resistance to be killed so that they couldn't resist him later on. Once they restarted the offensive in January, it only took two weeks to liberate Lodz and Auschwitz.

 

 

Un verdor terrible por Benjamín Labatut

    Un verdor terrible explora la historia de la ciencia y como se alterna en sus capacidades de promover y extinguir la vida. Labatut muestra como el mismo hombre puede inventar el gas de cloro, que mata a miles durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, y tambien el fertilizador con nitrogeno, que salva las vidas de milliones. Y como el mismo compuesto químico se usa para crear ambos el Zyklon B y el azul de prusia, amado de los pintores. Labatut usa las vidas personales de cientifícos para dramatizar al narrativo, y no pude resistir en pensar como Thomas Kuhn disentiría de este narrativo basado en la epifanía.

    El libro se acaba con un anecdota de como los árboles limones mueren. En su última cosecha, el limón pare una sobreabundancia de limónes, hasta que se rompen las ramas de estar sobrepesadas. Me parece que el propósito de esta anecdota es argumentar que el florecimiento de las ciencias en el siglo XX es una subreabundancia, que otorga mucho, pero que también presagia el fin de todo.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

    This is the first book that I've ever listened to, instead of read. Abundance is a very popular book right now for the challenge that it offers to liberals while offering an olive branch to conservatives. Klein and Thompson put forward ideas that seek to diminish economic inequalities by expanding the pie, rather than dividing it up differently. Left-wing critics will say that it fails to actually diminish inequality, and right-wing critics will say that the solutions really only apply to major cities, but I think that the "Abundance agenda" is a lot more positive than negative. It is important for the country to be able to build, whether in manufacturing, housing, transportation, or whatever is needed. I like that the book has an optimistic feel, and I've become a really big fan of Ezra Klein this year.

    I liked the audiobook as a format for the same reason I like podcasts, but I have to say that it is far inferior to reading a book and being able to take notes on it. I don't remember nearly as much of this as I would if it were a book that I could revisit. I will also say I far preferred Klein's parts of the book that he read to the ones that Thompson read. Thompson sounded patronizing to me. Anyway, it was a really good book, and regardless of their voices, I thought they put forth good ideas and a good new way of thinking about how we should evaluate ideas. The country will be better off if we embrace an abundance mentality than a scarcity mentality.

Maus by Art Spiegelman (The Complete Maus Vol. 1 & 2) (Re-read)

    I don't normally read graphic novels, but Maus is a special book. Art Spiegelman's relationship with his father reminds me of my own father's relationship with his father, also a Holocaust survivor. Maus really grippingly tells the story of the Holocaust and of interviewing a survivor of the Holocaust, and uses different animals to depict the Germans, Poles, Jews, Americans, etc. The animal metaphor is controversial, but I think it works very well, and is especially useful when depicting Jews (mice), who wear the masks of pigs (Poles) to blend in. 

    I remembered a good amount about the book, but not much since I last read it probably around the age of ten. I specifically recalled a scene early in Volume 1 where Art's father, Vladek, conscripted into the Polish Army, is not shooting at the oncoming Germans, afraid. A Polish NCO comes over, feels the coldness of his rifle, and reprimands him for not shooting. Then he does shoot, kills a German soldier, and when the Germans win the battle and take him prisoner, they shout at him for having a hot barrel, having shot. There was no winning, and I think that was very emblematic maybe not of the precise situation, but the general feeling of living through the Holocaust, when a Jew couldn't really ever make a "correct" choice. 

    Something I didn't remember so much was the information about Anja, Art's mother and Vladek's wife, who took her own life in 1968. That was a really tragic part of the whole book that I'd forgotten. I also took note of how different Vladek's Holocaust experience was than my grandfathers. My grandpa was in a ghetto for almost all of the war, working, while Vladek at times worked, at times faked his papers and pretended to be a Pole, at times was in hiding, and then ended up being sent to Auschwitz. It made me think of how diverse the experiences of the Holocaust could be. Maus is a very sad book, but it's a very beautiful book. It's just very real about difficult relationships between people, difficult choices, and above all love. One of the best books ever.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

    Another heavy book by Corman McCarthy. When I set out to read more literature this year, I specifically wanted to avoid heavy books like this, but he is so damn good at writing. I definitely didn't think I would want to read Westerns, but my friend Frank kept mentioning how good Cormac McCarthy is, so I gave All the Pretty Horses a try and now I'm hooked. The Crossing is the sequel to that book, and the second book of The Border Trilogy, but follows a completely different character. But like the protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, Billy Parham makes multiple trips down to Mexico, fails to achieve his goals there, and finds death instead, but also the wisdom and kindness of strangers. Now that I've read two McCarthy books, I notice some trends. The obvious one is not much punctuation. Another one is that the characters in these books inhabit our world, but it's not our world. People in these books are wiser, and kinder, but they're also capable of more cruelty. Most characters that we meet are strangers on the road or in small towns or haciendas, who usually show kindness either by sharing food or a story or wisdom. Some others we meet are pure evil, who commit cruelty for cruelty's sake. And a very small number are benign, usually working for some cruel overlord, but willing to be merciful; or they are a person with no reason to harm out characters, but admit to their indifference to human suffering. Spoilers ahead. McCarthy also uses his books to draw big contrasts between the United States and Mexico, and to use Mexico as almost a time warp, where we hear stories going back to the Mexican Revolution and see poverty that would suggest the Stone Age. And then the characters return north of the border and confront modernity in the form of cars, war, and diners.

    The book, I would say, is dominated by three big stories in each part. The first is Billy Parham's search for the she-wolf terrorizing the cattle of the land, finding her, and trying to bring her back to Mexico. The second is Billy and his brother Boyd as they try to find the men who killed their parents and stole their horses. And the third is Billy returning to Mexico to find his brother Boyd. All of the stories deal with cruelty, and all these missions end in failure. When Billy tries to join the Army for World War Two its a failure. Failure is just an all-pervading theme of this book. Another one is truth. Throughout the book, we hear people saying things that are false, and we hear stories emerge out of nothing, or take a kernel of truth and turn it into something else entirely.

    McCarthy loves a sensitive cowboy. He loves how they love their horses, and he loves to think about the thoughts they think while they sit alone on the range at night, or atop a horse in the morning. He loves to write about them crying over horses they've lost, and in this book, he writes about an inverted scene, a pregnant wolf that Billy Parham loses. One other thing he likes to write about is a wound that lasts. In this book, the dog's throat gets cut, rendering it mute, the boys cause the death of a one-armed man, and Billy meets a blind man who tells him his story. I think surviving with wounds or with disabilities is important to McCarthy.

    I love McCarthy's writing and I've really never read anything else like it, so I wanted to just throw a few examples in here that stood out to me while I was reading. This first one is long, but I really didn't expect him to jump into the mind and the whole backstory of a wolf:

THE WOLF had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animas range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

She crossed the Bavispe River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and she had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she’d found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.

She ranged west into Cochise County in the state of Arizona, across the south fork of Skeleton Creek and west to the head of Starvation Canyon and south to Hog Canyon Springs. Then east again to the high country between Clanton and Foster draws. At night she would go down onto the Animas Plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.

At this season the does were already carrying calves and as they commonly aborted long before term the one least favored so twice she found these pale unborn still warm and gawking on the ground, milkblue and near translucent in the dawn like beings miscarried from another world entire. She ate even their bones where they lay blind and dying in the snow. Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence. She might have left the country altogether if she had not come upon the scent of a wolf just below the high pass west of Black Point. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.

She circled the set for the better part of an hour sorting and indexing the varied scents and ordering their sequences in an effort to reconstruct the events that had taken place here. When she left she went down through the pass south following the tracks of the horses now thirty-six hours old.

By evening she’d found all eight of the sets and she was back at the gap of the mountain again where she circled the trap whining. Then she began to dig. She dug a hole alongside the trap until the caving dirt fell away to reveal the trap’s jaw. She stood looking at it. She dug again. When she left the set the trap was sitting naked on the ground with only a handful of dirt over the waxed paper covering the pan and when the boy and his father rode through the gap the following morning that was what they found.

Just a good quote that illustrates the type of words McCarthy puts into unnamed strangers' mouths:

    The boy didnt know if he understood or not. The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

More wisdom from strangers, who predict the future or understand what has happened far away, which is that Billy's parents have been murdered.

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy’s saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huérfano. But the boy only raised one hand and touched his hat and rode on.

Sometimes, you can't be sure who exactly is talking, thanks to the lack of punctuation. The result is to be unsure if we are hearing narration or Billy Parham's thoughts. This is one such example of that, which also serves as an example of the theme of simple kindness of strangers:

He went back to the kitchen and looked for something with which to write. In the end he dusted flour from the bowl on the sideboard over the wooden table and wrote his thanks in that and went out and got his horse and led it afoot down the zaguán and out through the portal. Behind in the patio the little mule turned the pugmill tirelessly. He mounted up and rode out down the little dusty street nodding to those he passed on his way. Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his belly the gift of the meal he’d received which both sustained him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not such a simple thing nor is its acknowledgement. Whatever thanks be given, however spoke or written down.

And this is just a bizarre example of the needless cruelty that is so common in McCarthy's writing. It makes you wonder what happened to him. And by the way, I looked it up, and this is not humanly possible:

The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.

And here is another example of the types of conversations people have in these books. Just one of many:

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Qué piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he’d given. He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men’s thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he’d already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.