The act of writing was its own reward for McCarthy. In a long career, he gave few interviews, and rarely explained himself. He didn’t make himself known. I can’t say that I love everything he wrote. Sometimes, when his prose enters the Biblical register, I find myself baffled and unmoved. Neither am I a completist. I resisted reading the last two novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” both published last year, for fear of denting my appreciation of the earlier ones. I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished.
