*The Stonemason

The Stonemason -Cormac McCarthy
I would like to say, “the best book I’ve read in years.” And I can say it, and mean it, in certain terms. A book that makes NYU’s rejection a must. A book that solidifies my deepest religion. A book that makes me stand up and turn around and admire what it is I’m sitting on.
“The audience may perhaps be also a jury. And now we can begin. As the mathematician Gauss said to his contemporaries: Go forward and faith will come to you.”
“And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work.”
“He says that to a man who’s never laid a stone there’s nothing you can tell him. Even the truth would be wrong.”
And does this echo of Marilynne Robinson… I’m sure he must have read Housekeeping. Or at least he sees something kindred in the dirt of fiction… “In what tense do you speak of those who have vanished? You don’t speak of them. You are simply enslaved to them.”
“Somewhere there is someone who wants to know. Nor will I have to seek him out. He’ll find me.”
“The work devours the man and devours his life and I thought that in the end he must be somehow justified thereby. That if enough of the world’s weight only pass through his hands he must become inaugurated into the reality of that world in a way to withstand all scrutiny.”
“Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?”