No es país para viejos
Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope along the Rio Grande. He finds men shot dead, heroin and $2 million in cash. Taking the money, he knows, will change everything. Later, as the bodies begin to pile up, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell attempts to understand the carnage. Cormac McCarthy's prose, stripped of what William Butler Yeats called the "sensual music" of the world, is note-perfect Texan. Here, Sheriff Bell ruminates upon life and death:
"I read the papers every mornin. Mostly I suppose just to try and figure out what might be headed this way. Not that I've done all that good of a job at headin it off. It keeps gettin harder. Here a while back they was two boys run into one another and one of em was from California and one from Florida. And they met somewheres or other in between. And then they set out together travlin around the country killin people. I forget how many they did kill. Now what are the chances of a thing like that? Them two had never laid eyes on one another. There cant be many of em. I dont think. Well, we dont know. Here the other day they was a woman put her baby in a trash compactor. Who would think of doing such a thing? My wife wont read the papers no more. She's probably right. She generally is."
From Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium: "That is no country for old men. The young / In one another's arms, birds in the trees / Those dying generations — at their song." Cormac McCarthy darkened the Irish poet's vision in The Crossing when he invoked "A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood," and he gave full flight to this bloodlust in No Country for Old Men. Tonight, we're off to the Oscar-winning film, which is adapted from the McCarthy novel. Let's see what the Coen brothers have done with the book that harkens back to Byzantium.
