The Undesired Crossroad

Sometimes you are faced with a really lousy set of options.

Sometimes that lousy set of options is your own fault.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor wrestles with exactly that problem.

A brilliant book. Just brilliant. You won’t forget it.

First though, we need to straighten one thing out.  This book is called a screenplay.  Don’t even think about watching the movie.  It’s awful.  Just read the book.  McCarthy is an amazing novelist, perhaps the greatest living writer.  He is a lousy screenwriter, a really lousy screenwriter. 

The world you live in is a world which has been made up of previous choices you have made. 

You may not have intended to create the world in which you live, but you did create it.  Once you find yourself in your current world, you will often find yourself at a crossroad, but it is not the crossroad you want. 

You want the crossroad to be whether you have to live in this world you created or not.  You want to decide whether you have to endure the consequences of your previous actions. 

But that is not the crossroad you are at.  You have no choice. 

You might give everything to avoid the consequences of your previous actions, but you cannot change your previous actions.  You are at a crossroad, but it is only the crossroad of deciding whether you will accept the fact that you have created this world you did not want or whether you refuse to accept the fact that you cannot change the world you created by your previous actions. 

But, it gets worse. 

It is not simply that you must endure the pain of knowing that the world you created is painful because of things you have done. 

You also have to make decisions now and then later on you are faced with other decisions you did not see coming at all.  You will in the future be faced with decisions you would rather not make, but you will have to make them later on because of the decisions you make now. 

But, it gets worse.  There are other people out there who are also making decisions.  And some of those people do not have the moral scruples which you have. 

And in a world in which those with moral scruples, no matter how small those scruples may be, meet those without moral scruples, the latter will win.

Like all of Cormac McCarthy’s work, this novel has a deeply moral core. 

We go through life trying to skirt the edges of being moral.  We think we can commit a small sin here or there and that it won’t really matter. 

But every time we commit those small sins, those small violations of our moral code, we create a new world in which we must live with the consequences of those past violations of our moral code.  One violation of your moral code leads to new choices and you cannot escape those new choices.  And once you are down that road, there is no going back.  Along that road you will meet people who do not have the same limits as you, and when you meet them, you will not like the results of all those previous choices you made.

And right now, you are thinking this is all a bit overblown.  You are thinking that just because you make this small decision now, you will not end up with your world destroyed.    

The hunter has a purity of heart that exists nowhere else.  I think he is not defined so much by what he has come to be as by all that he has escaped being.  You can make no distinction between what he is and what he does.  And what he does is kill.  We of course are another matter.  I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen.  Ill-formed and ill-prepared.  We would like to draw a veil over all that blood and terror.  That have brought us to this place.  It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in doing so it makes of it our destiny.  Perhaps you would not agree.  I don’t know.  But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.

If you think this is overblown, you have just closed your eyes. 

Don’t act surprised when you cannot undo your prior actions because you don’t like the results.