A Short Interview with Cormac McCarthy on the Occasion of His 135th Birthday
You know if you, uh, sit here long enough and look at the desert like I have, your mind turns to annihilation and the fate of stones and man’s fate, cruelty and passing away, things like that...
BR: We sit here in New Mexico on your 135th birthday. How did this happen?
CM: I can’t understand it myself.
BR: Living to 135 or my being here?
CM: Either one. You know if you, uh, sit here long enough and look at the desert like I have, your mind turns to annihilation and the fate of stones and man’s fate, cruelty and passing away, things like that, and it’s hard to know what to say about life not ending. I don’t know what to do with it. Baudelaire has that line about an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom, and I’m afraid I live in an oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. I can’t account for it.
BR: Have you done new work on the unconscious?
CM: Work on the unconscious?
BR: Yes, continued your old work on the unconscious.
CM: I’ve been thinking about it for a few decades. You see it’s not theoretical or scientific work. I began with George Zweig’s old night shift idea. Mathematicians and and scientists and writers work on a problem and work on a problem and don’t get anywhere with it, and then suddenly they figure it out all at once when falling asleep or waking up. That’s not a theoretical idea but a practical observation. A long time ago I wrote about Kekulé, who got the configuration of the benzene molecule in a dream. The unconscious understands language, but it doesn’t communicate with language. It gives us pictures.
BR: Does this run afoul of Wittgenstein’s private language problem?
CM: How do you mean?
BR: The kind of internal processes you talk about with the unconscious lack external criteria or justification. If the unconscious were not communicating to us with language, how would we make sense of it? When there’s no external criteria, when the whole thing is internal, you get something like Wittgenstein’s example of someone who buys several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true. How can we be sure we’re translating the unconscious’ images properly? How do we understand them as symbols or images?
CM: Those are interesting questions, and Wittgenstein has been important to me, though he wasn’t right about everything. But you’re talking about the unconscious as a theoretical problem and not as a practical experience of thinking. What I tried to do was describe how it is thinking happens for me and for my scientist friends. That man with the newspapers reminds me of Dirac, who would just say the same thing again if asked what he meant. You could say that separating the capacity to solve mathematical problems from an inner process is not the denial of how mathematicians experience problem solving, that this denial affirms that experience but not as criteria for meaning, identity, or truth, but then you’re avoiding the mystery of the night shift and the mystery of thinking. I’m interested in the philosophy of mathematics, in the foundation of mathematics—and Wittgenstein was too, he lectured about it—but I’m not interested in fitting my ideas about the unconscious into a philosophical system.
BR: You haven’t published a book since A Farthing thirty years ago.1 Do you still write? Is there another book?
CM: I still wander over to the typewriter from time to time. All my friends are dead. Mostly I look at the desert.
A Farthing concerned an unnamed Grothendieck-like figure who attempts to flee from his life as a mathematician by taking hard physical jobs and living in monasteries but who finds himself again and again waking up in strange canyons solving mathematical problems with charcoal on bare rock faces and boulders. He wrestles with his vocation until physical exhaustion and poor health leave him bedbound. Then he retreats to memories of his teacher, Nicolas Farthing, physicist and sailor, and Farthing’s suicide. The book ends with a dream. Isaac Newton paces an empty field. He explains the foundation of mathematics is nature, not ideas. He wonders at the cruelty of that. Critics marveled at his writing such a book at such an advanced age. None knew what to do with the ending.