Questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight | Passage from (and a little riff on) Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree

A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him: Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?

They’d listen to my death.

No final word?

Last words are only words.

You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.

I’d say I was not unhappy.

You have nothing.

It may be the last shall be first.

Do you believe that?

No.

What do you believe?

I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.

Equally?

It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.

Of what would you repent?

Nothing.

Nothing?

One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

From Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree.

I first read Suttree around thirteen years ago. I’m not sure how many times I’ve waded into it since then. At least two more times in full, plus another two times on audiobook, via Richard Poe’s marvelous narration. I checked the audiobook out from my library again (via Hoopla, which has about everything Audible has, I reckon) a few weeks ago, and fell asleep to Buddy Suttree’s various McAnally misadventures, often not falling asleep as quickly as I planned to. The novel is incredibly rich and fertile, filled with pockets that seem to reverberate stronger from the past viewed through the strange glass of having read McCarthy’s final novel The Passenger late last year, a capstone novel, a novel of insane sobriety that answers to Suttree’s oversoul drunkenness. The Passenger is perhaps Suttree’s secret sequel. Poe’s Suttree narration dipped into my daytime hours—drives and chores, and then just listening and doing nothing else. I forgot so many things: How fucking funny the novel is (I knew this but forgot it, remembering all its bumbling and baffling tragedies); all the shenanigans Suttree and his boys get into (he, I suspect the deferred narrator of his own manic enterprises, always allows himself a measure of impartiality as a witness). I forgot how many of Suttree’s McAnally pals die. I forgot how sad the novel is. Anyway. I was finishing up some domestic chore—let’s call it squeezing the late fall lemons from the lemon tree into a concentrate to freeze, we’ve given all we can away, and they’ll spoil otherwise; or maybe I was finishing kneading a loaf of bread; or maybe something mundane as folding towels and rags hot from the dryer—anyway, I was finishing some or other chore when this passage floated through my ears, caught a bit of purchase, seemed worth sharing. Read Suttree!