The first time I encountered the Bomb in a Cormac McCarthy novel, I missed it. At the end of The Crossing, the second of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, protagonist Billy Parham is wandering in southern New Mexico after having buried most everything and everyone he has loved. He is awakened “in the white light of the desert noon,” which turns out to be a false noon, a light that “draw[s] away along the edges of the world” to reveal the still-night. Billy walks out into the road and calls vainly for a broken-down dog he’d chased away the night before. He sits down in the road and weeps. “He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.” So ends the book. Like Billy, I had no idea, on first reading, what it was that had happened. More astute readers would recognize it as the Trinity test, conducted near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945.
Read Full Article »
