After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of art something has been gained for the human race and “the work of art transmits an uninterrupted message.” As so often happens, synchronous occurrences dominate my hours. Just a day later, as my family hiked down a small mountain, my daughter went over a short footbridge and called the water underneath a stream, whereby my wife corrected and offered, small stream. I encroached and called it a rill. I never heard of that, my wife said, and I replied, Read any Cormac McCarthy novel — he uses it as least once and maybe twice per novel, except maybe the last one. This would have been the “uninterrupted message” talking. McCarthy had instilled this identification of natural landscapes in me, from the hills, red oaks, and maples of Tennessee to the dusty plains and playas in Mexico — two places I’ve never visited but I feel a part of their landscape like I have spent some months in each place.
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