Cormac McCarthy (via his alter ego, Cornelius Suttree) on What it Means to be Human

As I watched the news coverage of the manhunt for Dzokhar Tsarnaev today, I had to turn off the TV. The 'news' coverage, apocryphal stories that couldn't seem to keep up with social media coverage of the situation, really little more than overeager speculation and, in some cases, outright misinformation, got my own mental gears grinding and I started to speculate, too. My head was filled with questions like: Was this whole thing a grand conspiracy, a false flag operation perpetrated on the American people by it's sworn protectors? And would they ever even find him? If so, would they take him alive? Or would he be killed in a fire fight, blown to bits by one of his home made explosives or riddled with bullets by cops running on adrenaline and pulling the trigger reflexively, more muscle memory than volition? Would we ever know the (true) motives behind the Boston Marathon Bombings?

And then, my eager desire to find answers to these questions was transformed into the sobering realization that this morbid curiosity was kind of depressing, sick, even, like salivating over a play-by-play broadcast of an execution.

"Now, the doctor is sanitizing the needle. The condemned man lays strapped to the operating table, breathing normally, resigned to his fate."

(Now, after he's been caught, as I peruse all the social media output (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) related to the event, I find myself even more sickened to see how happy everyone is at the news of his capture because so many people don't really seem to be happy that further bloodshed has been avoided. They seem happy that now he will be made to stand trial and he will probably be killed for what he and his brother did. How is more killing an answer to anything? Why are we so eager to judge others? Why don't we try and empathize? I pray for compassion but I've a sneaking suspicious that my plea will fall on deaf ears.

And I remember a quote from a certain sagacious and enigmatic wizard: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the wise cannot see all ends."

Yes, Gandalf is a fictional creation, but his existence was conjured up by a man who'd seen humanity at it's absolute worst. Tolkien had been in the trenches at the Somme, a battle during World War One that caused more than a million casualties over the course of a four and half month span. I think that qualifies him as an 'expert' when it comes to explaining the role that compassion plays in defining what it means to be human because he witnessed the catastrophic consequences of divorcing that component from our operational motives).

This initial set of realizations were followed closely by another, even more terrible one: even if we do find out why all of this happened, it's just one example (out of the thousands and millions that have taken place throughout history) of man's cruelty towards his fellow man, of our capacity to do such damage to one another. Some people just seem incapable of tending to that 'spark' of life inside each one of us. Instead of cupping it and stoking the fire, occasionally blowing on it or adding more kindling, fostering a controlled burn that will last throughout the night, they let it ignite some vast reservoir of hate or frustration or anger or madness that rages out of control and ends up consuming them whole, a microcosmic holocaust.

Sure, there are motives for each individual event but the existence of that impulse, the biological reason as to why we should desire to hurt and kill and maim and cause pain seems inexplicable to me. We are supposed to be more logical and compassionate than our animal brothers. But they kill out of necessity. If they don't, they die. But we seem very capable of consciously choosing to kill others for motives that are very far from ensuring survival, needlessly, senselessly.

I've always felt that compassion and empathy are traits that help compose the core of what it means to be human, but events like this force me to confront the fact that many others define it in very different ways.

And the more I thought about this, the lonelier I felt. Maybe not 'lonely'. More isolated. Or exiled without knowing why or what I'd done. I looked at the situation, the facts, and thought about the little boy who was killed on Monday or about the people who were maimed or injured or even the witnesses and despite all that horrible carnage, I couldn't stop thinking about the kid who perpetrated the atrocity.

I didn't think about his motives. I thought about what it was like to be 19. I thought about how he was probably scared out of his mind (he'd witnessed his brother being shot to death not 24 hours earlier and was literally being hunted by thousands of law enforcement and military, some of whom I'm sure were very eager to avenge those killed and injured by the bomb blasts). He was all alone, hiding under a boat in some strangers backyard, not sure of how many hours he had left on this earth. I'm still amazed they were able to take him alive. My inability to think about anything but him made me feel so distant from the rest of the people watching the event, because it seemed like the polar opposite of where everyone else's hearts and minds were at.

Transitioning back to earlier in the afternoon: I walked away from the TV, closed my laptop and began a search for distraction that ended up with me opening up my copy of "Suttree" by Cormac McCarthy. I opened it to a random page and stumbled upon a conversation between the eponymous main character and an acquaintance, an itinerant 'ragpicker' (a dirty, old vagabond scavenger). Here it is:

"I seen strange things in my time. I seen that cyclome come through here where it went down in the river it dipped it dry you could see the mud and stones in the bottom of it naked and fishes layin there. It picked up folks' houses and set em down again in places where they'd never meant to live. They was mail addressed to Knoxville fell in the streets of Ringgold Georgia. I've seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death. 

He might hear you, Suttree said. 

I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter. 

No one wants to die. 

Shit, said the ragpicker. Here's one that's sick of liven. 

Would you give all you own?

The ragman eyed him suspiciously but he did not smile. It won't be long, he said. An old man's days are hours. 

And what happens then? 

When?

After your dead?

Dont nothin happen. You're dead. 

You told me once you believed in God. 

The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could. 

What would you say to him?

Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together. 

Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?

The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I don't believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer."

And I couldn't believe that it had been that page out of all the 470-plus pages that make up that book that I'd stumbled upon. I was quite literally gobsmacked. I wondered if it was a coincidence or fate or if somebody upstairs with an intimate knowledge of my proclivities felt that maybe catering to my love of literature was going to be the best way to communicate a profound message to me, to induce an epiphany about the true nature of the world in this (sometimes cynical) skeptic? 

Regardless of the real reason as to why I'd opened the book up and found that particular episode (because let's face it, it was either a coincidence or it had something to do with the way I'd bent the books spine, something mundane like that) I found comfort in what most would view to be a rather bleak passage. Well, maybe the comfort I've found is not the words of the passage, but the place they take me to.  

My interpretation of the ragpickers message is this: you can't explain somethings in life. You just can't. To borrow a cliche, the "mysteries of life" really do exist and are abundant. You have to accept this and the sooner you do, the sooner you uncover the hidden upside: just because certain things can never be known completely, that shouldn't stop you from trying to get a better understanding of them. You have to be tenacious, you have to struggle with it because just trying to understand is a form of compassion in and of itself. There is (immense) value in the attempt, to try and put yourself in the other's (metaphysical) shoes and to try and empathize with them, to understand what drove them to do something so heinous. At the very least, a little reflection, some soul searching can't hurt because it helps us to learn more about ourselves. A little nod to Socrates and that old maxim: nosce te ipsum. In knowing ourselves better, we become better prepared to understand others and I believe the more we try and understand others, the more we can focus on our similarities, on that which unites and brings us together (and there is so much of that). If we can adopt the attitude that we are in this struggle together, striving for the light instead of wallowing and/or dragging one another down back into the darkness, maybe we'll be more inclined to try to help one another. That is my hope, at least.

I'm inclined to believe that once you get past the almost hip/style nihilistic ennui, Thom Yorke would agree with me. Then again, maybe not.

So, while it is not the same thing as being able to hug the people I love and tell them I love them face-to-face (very far from it, actually), Cormac McCarthy-cum-Cornelius Suttree was able to comfort me and help me during a moment of grave doubt in humanity. In reappropriating (and reinterpreting) his work,  I have yet another reason to be grateful to him for sharing his writing with the world.