For those unfamiliar, Stella Maris is Cormac McCarthy's last book, published in an omnibus alongside its sister novel The Passenger. I read TP last year and liked it a lot; both books are strange and unique, but SM is considerably more esoteric & difficult to read. The whole book is a series of dialogues between Alice Western, an inconceivably smart math prodigy with what most people would consider schizophrenia, and her psychiatrist; it takes place at the mental hospital Stella Maris, where Alice has committed herself. Their talks get to some truly esoteric places, plumbing the depths of questions like "does mathematics exist separately from the observing mind?" and "if coherent individual identity is an illusion, then to whom is it illusory?" and "is there a terrible monster at the core of reality that our sapient brains protect us from witnessing?"
It's an apt sendoff for an incredible mind. This book is strange & mysterious, full of philosophical musings and linguistic ornaments that make it a challenging but very rewarding read. It felt Joycean at times (he directly quotes Joyce at one point: "we were Jung and easily Freudened," hilarious), with that same atmosphere of "I could study for a lifetime and still not understand all of this, so I'm just going to let it wash over me and appreciate the atmosphere." In the same way as Ulysses, you could return to this book many times over the course of a life and it would illuminate new ideas each time.
As with all McCarthy, there are some staggeringly beautiful passages. I lingered on this one & have it saved in the Quotes note on my phone:
What's even more remarkable is that there is no prototype to the violin. It simply appears out of nowhere in all its perfection…. unless you're willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little ice age of 15th century Italy and sod and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for 7 years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then – knowing this perfect thing – took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.
(It turns out this is not true–the violin does have precursors in the historical record–but that's not really relevant, it's just a gorgeous passage.)
Alice also explains an extended metaphor wherein language is a parasitic organism that invaded the human consciousness ~100k years ago, and our poor unconscious minds (which have evolved over millions of years without access to language) have had to scramble to keep up with this new mode of understanding reality. Hence dreams, hence mental illness, hence the unconscious mind solving problems for you while you're thinking about something else.
10/10, amazing book. Don't go into it with a magnifying glass trying to puzzle out every question and detail; read it slowly and let it take your mind where your mind wants to go.
Thanks Cormac, you did good. RIP.
by LazarusRises