On June 13, American writer Cormac McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is only one month away from his 90th birthday. Since the publication and popularity of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, McCarthy has been among the great writers and has been loved and noticed by a large number of readers and audiences. Since Melville, McCarthy has been more sophisticated in composition and rhyme than any writer, and the writer Robert Macfarlane wrote in his eulogy that the most important but least conspicuous word in McCarthy's dictionary is "and," which strung together the cruel and the ordinary, the violent and the good, like the light of the desert, or the tragic history of human disillusionment, recursion, and depth.
McCarthy did not become a mystery like the typical postmodernist. Drawing on the spirit of the United States, he hooked up the western literature of the pioneer period and the apocalyptic game of the present, and created a novel that is completely landscaped and perceptively perceptible in a generally prose, intimate and distant style. In his works, the believers of war, the barbarians, and the nameless are forever alone, but they seem to have gathered thousands of people, and they have fallen into a storm that engulfs everything.
Cormac McCarthy's typewriter
McCarthy was one of the most successful full-time writers since World War II, and before his work became popular, he lived mainly on labor and high-level foundation sponsorship. McKinsey enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1951, dropped out to join the Air Force, and hosted radio shows while stationed in Alaska. He returned to the University of Tennessee in 1957, where his short stories, A Drowning Incident and Wake for Susan, were published in the school magazine and won an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, but McCarthy dropped out. His first work, The Man Who Saw the Orchard, was awarded by the William Faulkner Foundation. McCarthy sent the manuscript of The Orchard Man to the only publisher he knew, Random House. At that time, Random House was far from as large as it is today. Coincidentally, the manuscript came to the desk of editor Albert Erskine, editor of Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner, who published the work for McCarthy.
Until 1992, McCarthy's work did not sell more than 5,000 copies. In the era of publishing that was not "sufficient" commercialization, Random House would still worry about sales, but would not cut McCarthy's work because of poor sales, so when "Children of God" was published, the editor asked McCarthy about marketing plans, and McCarthy wrote back that "Tonight Show" host Ed McMahon and I had fished together, and he would like to help. Thanks to the patience of Random House and Albert Erskine, McCarthy was able to continue to produce new works. In 1989, McCarthy wrote to a friend who had been writing full-time for 28 years and had never received a single royalty check.
After 1960, publishing houses were acquired and integrated by large companies and groups, and the publishing industry almost became the world of giants. At the same time, literary agents emerged and played an important intermediary role between authors and publishers. In 1989, Alberto Bittale became CEO of Random House, and how to make each book make money on its own became the company's credo. Around the same time, in 1987, McCarthy's former editor retired and Gary Fisk Jong accepted him, and McCarthy sent a letter to Lynn Nesbitt to make him his literary agent, perhaps convincing her of his MacArthur Genius Award title. In 1992, the success of "The World's Horse" was inseparable from the excellent distribution acumen of Gary Fiskjon and Chip Kidd. McCarthy's Chinese complete translation was originally "The Horse of the World", translated by Shang Yuming and Wei Tiehan, and once translated as "The Long Neighing of the Horse" and "The Horse". In the new form of publishing, McCarthy once again became a beneficiary. His most recent literary agent is Amanda Urban.
Book cover of "The World's Horses"
In short, he wrote full-time all his life, and twelve novels are roughly divided into three periods by the academic community: the Southern Fiction Period, "The Orchard Keeper," "Outer Dark," "Child of God," "Suttree"; Western novels or U.S.-Mexico border novels, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men; Post-apocalyptic novels, The Road, The Passenger, Stella Maris. But I tend to think that because McCarthy never relied too much on geography and the will of the times, and because he focused on individual stylistic explorations and textual experiments, these twelve novels are self-contained and do not deviate from what they take for granted.
Destiny, America and blood
McCarthy was born in Rhode Island to an Irish Catholic family. His father was a well-known lawyer, but he did not like the opulence and was curious about the "dark world" in the surrounding shacks. He hated school, but was curious, and in his early 20s, his scattered hobbies were packed into literature and fiction. He liked writers who faced the question of life and death, excluding Proust and Melville and Dostoevsky after Henry James.
Life and death are at stake, not destiny. The concept of destiny is the entrance into McCarthy's literary world. The concept of destiny is related to the imagination and acceptance of the destiny of God in the United States. In 1845, the journalist John Sullivan wrote in the New York Morning Post, "Providence has given us the right to expand and occupy the entire continent, a free experiment given to us by God for development and a task given to us by the federal government." ”
But McCarthy did not dwell on the concept of "destiny" for long, because for him, fate did not exist, fate was insignificant. Whites love luck, disguised themselves as barbarians, carry out slaughter and plunder, and eventually turn the world into a conspiracy. In "Blood Meridian," for example, McCarthy, perhaps the most familiar work to Chinese readers, reveals violence and blood under rules and morality. "The trails of the gold prospectors end in the ashes mentioned above, and at the meeting point of these trails in the desert, the courage and aggressiveness of a small people are devoured and taken away by another people; The former priest asked if anyone had noticed such a cynical god who was manipulating a fatal encounter while showing grimness and pretending to be frightened." The third-party witnesses who have the evidence and the truth will not exist either, they will only push the story into the dark box.
As Judge Holden argued, "In the process of escalating the game to the ultimate state, you have no chance to argue the concept of destiny." Choosing one over the other is irretrievably preferred, and it is a far-reaching decision, because if someone ignores the power or meaning behind the decision, it is no different from a fool. "Fate is ruleless, but the game has rules, and once the game is started, the endgame must be borne by it, so the judge's view of war as the truest divination is not as cruel and serious as McCarthy presents." It is the greater will that pits the will of one against the will of the other, and chooses among them, because it is this greater will that binds them together. War is the ultimate game because it is ultimately about forcibly unifying everything. War is God. ”
In 1981, McCarthy joined forces with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and A. Ammons. R. Ammons), Shelly Errington, David Pingree, Derek Walcott, Roy Mottahedeh and others received the inaugural MacArthur Genius Award. When he learned of the MacArthur Genius Award, he was in a motel in Knoxville. McCarthy used the prize money to travel to the Southwest and initiate the writing of Blood Meridian.
According to Heidegger, human existence is in a state of "thrown/cast" in a priori sense, that is, people are always limited and determined by circumstances. But McCarthy dismissed Heidegger's existential theory. Indeed, Heidegger downplays the existence of others, and his named "planning/casting" has a phenomenological aspect, but still a logical naivety. McCarthy's strategy or attitude is more like Nietzsche, and finitude is placed in a crucial position by him, and all dreams and transcendences are futile. As the Blood Meridian depicts, "They all bear Christian names, but they are people of another era who have lived in the wilderness all their lives like their fathers." They learn war from war [...] Although many parts of the world are mysterious, the boundaries of the world are not mysterious, because the world is boundless, there are many more terrifying creatures, people of other colors, and beings that no one has ever seen, but these are not as strange as they feel in their hearts, regardless of the wilderness or the beast. ”
Granton didn't care about Heidegger's "thrown-out." He is resilient, he affirms himself by identifying with fate, and even declares defeat a victory. In the 1850s, the notorious John Joel Granton wreaked havoc in California, scalping and other punishments on ghosts under the knife and carrying the heads of Indians, Yuma, and Mexicans for revelry. This historical history is called the Yuma Ferry Massacre, which sounded the precursor to the Yuma War. Granton was then taken revenge by the Yuma.
In Blood Meridian, Granton exhausts his means and ambitions: driving the local Sonora people to build fortifications; detained more than a dozen Indian and Mexican women; Countless jewels and pistols were collected. But in the end he also died of fate, which is not "being", but nature. As Judge Holden said, "This desert to which so many people have yielded is vast, suitable only for a tough heart, but it is also ultimately empty." Harsh and barren. Its essence is stone. ”
"Blood Meridian" book cover
The fate of the stone, or Ishmael, is borne by the brats. The kid was originally a member of the scalping army, just a teenager. The kid doesn't have Granton's heroism, he never takes the initiative, and at the same time rejects the temptation of the judge. That is, the brat resists the temptation of fate. The kid did not succeed, and he was expelled from Fort Smith early on due to his relationship with the goats and became a free man. Evil grew in the kid's heart, and he became strong, but his twisting and delay finally annoyed Judge Holden, and the kid, who was supposed to become the judge's successor, died tragically.
"That's the mystery." The old man who played the role of a prophet told the kid early on, "Man always can't figure out what is in his head because he can only use his brain to know the brain." He can know his heart, but he doesn't. That's it. It's best not to look inside. The heart of all things does not always follow God's arrangement. Evil exists in the lowest creatures, but when God created man, the devil was also at hand. People can do anything. Build machines, build machines that can make machines. Evil can operate on its own for a thousand years, and it doesn't matter. Do you believe it or not? ”
Granton, Holden, Boy, they have a common identity - cowboys. The cowboy myth takes place during the development of the West and the popularity of cheap novels. In a way, McCarthy is the successor to the cowboy myth. In 1992, the more cowboy than "Blood Meridian" sold 190,000 copies in six months, and the author McCarthy received large-scale coverage and research. Along with this, McCarthy was called the most unsung master of his time. Later, "The World's Horse" was adapted into a movie, but the response was not good. Richard Slotkin believes that the revival of Westerns in the 1980s is a nostalgia for old films.
Throughout the border trilogy ("The World's Horse", "Crossing", "The City on the Plain"), the last cowboy Billy Parham and John Grady perform the final heroic complex for readers on the US-Mexico border. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States and Mexico have been in a state of tension, and various forces are fighting here. After World War II, Billy tried to join the army, but was not accepted by the army, and eventually found a job in the camp, and later he crossed the border several times, clearing the pagan tribes formed along the border by the way.
In Mexico, people shed their low-level identities in narrative poetry and dressed up as heroes. But even after the baptism of various revolutions, the high-ranking people, landlords, and foreign forces still dominated people's lives. In fact, the Kolido remained until after World War II, and people still looked forward to the fall of justice and kindness.
McCarthy, on the other hand, was perhaps more inclined to believe that there was never a bloodless statement that all people could coexist in harmony and weaken people and give up their souls and freedoms early. As Paul Valery is quoted earlier in Blood Meridian, "Your thoughts are terrible, and your hearts are weak. Your actions, which are both compassionate and cruel, are in themselves absurd, and you act in a manner that is impetuous, as if everything were irresistible. And in the end, your fear of blood intensifies. Fear of blood, fear of time. ”
"Our order has never been the order of the world, or even the order we customize in the sense of Nietzsche. In the desert we mark the way, or we read the footsteps of others, but we never grasp the future or make it fit our liking. Harold Bloom introduces the reader this way, "For the subject is never our perspective or projection of the world, nor is it our transcendent condition of perceiving the world; It is merely another empirical fact, merely inherent in the world, like any other existence. Moreover, Harold Bloom called it the pinnacle of American pragmatism.
Sutri, landscape and home
"We came to the world of the world. In these strange places, in these filthy slums and devastated garbage heaps, righteous people see a different kind of life dream in the carriages of trains and cars. Deformed, black, mentally ill, they escape all order and are strangers in every land. "Sutry best reveals McCarthy's worldview and the relationship between his life and writing.
In a way, Sutry is the embodiment of McCarthy, who loves wandering, darkness, and fascination with eternal things, such as stones. "Sutry" takes place in Knoxville in the 1950s and later replaced James Agee's A Death in the Family as the legend of Knoxville. Makanani apartments, the failure of romances, pilgrimages to the Appalachian mountains, someone died in his bed... Sutry places himself in the world of vagabond fiction. And this is obviously McCarthy's early experience: thief, prostitute, murderer, alcoholic...
Cover of the book "Sutri"
Sutri was imprisoned for "watermelon rape under the moon". McCarthy's camera turns, focusing on the disputes in the bureau: Harrogate tinkering with his prison ring with a spoon on the bed; Bird Slather, so annoyed by the constant clanging noise, dragged the shackles on his feet and angrily rebuked Harrogate; Sutry kindly intervened to stop it, was blocked, was scolded as a hooligan, and smashed with a fist; Bird's fist smashed into the other inmates; Callahan intervenes, the guards attack, and Callahan is taken away.
In 1951, Sutry roamed Market Street, where discarded trucks piled with produce and flowers made it look like a country bazaar, untouchables occupied the sidewalks, and blind singers, organists and harmonica-playing hymns walked the streets. And Sutri weaves among vendors and beggars, and along the way meets some fanatical street missionaries, who are talking about a lost world with an energy unknown to ordinary people. After McCarthy's repeated depiction of the scene, the exclamation "I am a poor child" finally appeared.
Immediately after, "Jebo", "Bone Erosion", "Pig's Head", "Greek", "Red Hair", "Sea Frog", "Big Man" ... Many of them have only nicknames, as well as identities in disguise. And all this of this ends up in sexual stories, which are pretty dirty by standard grammar, but so urban that they don't allow for the intervention of others and the Other," Callahan struck him in the stomach with the back of his hand. Hi Jim, he said, why did you hang down? He glanced around. The prostitutes raised their heads nervously. He grinned at the toothless mouth and smiled at all of them. Ladies, he said. He crouched down slightly and peeked behind the tavern. If McCarthy had repeated similar fragments in this era, he would never have allowed such writing to appear contrary to the will of the times.
As shown above, McCarthy's characters have no proclivities, loves and hates, and smiles, all they have is constant action, constantly immersing themselves in the mysterious universe and nature, and have no superfluous illusions. They can be heroes, they can be wicked, they can be Satan or judges, but they can never be bland victors, free people.
Personal names (salutations) and pronouns are intertwined in parallel, but there are few personal names and many pronouns. It is actually difficult for the reader to directly judge which His Holiness a certain act or sentence came from, and this requires repeated proofreading by the reader. And why did McCarthy take this somewhat ambiguous approach? I guess it is to increase the depth of the text, because McCarthy does not have "three-dimensional" characters, "three-dimensional" scenes, and he cannot rely on the mixed "perceptual coexistence" and clean dramatic conflict to summon the "dream" he needs.
And this is also related to the fact that McCarthy was always hands-on, that is, there was not so much of a presumptive separation between his life practice and fictional experiments, and he was neither material nor master, but an equal interlocutor with words. This makes him so densely spread and so volatile in language, which cannot be considered in terms of its beauty, but in terms of its occurrence, and the reader is constantly reminded that he has to express it so because he has to. Once, when Sutry rushed to the houseboat in a rainstorm, McCarthy described, "May the storm of heaven and earth sweep me away, and I will be stronger." My face will turn into rain like those stones. Steven Shaviro argues that McCarthy's language is gently drifting across the desert, a metaphor that is somewhat beautiful and distorted, but still true.
McCarthy was a staunch migrant, a itinerant, a nomad, and his home was in that skeleton. After leaving school, McCarthy moved to Chicago, worked part-time in an auto parts warehouse, and married Lee Holleman, a poet and author of Desire's Door, a marriage that soon went bankrupt and the two conceived a son. He was married three times, the first two of which were short. According to the limited biographical information currently available, McCarthy did not have a good settlement life in his early years. For a while, he spent mostly outside the campfire ring, bathing in the lake with his wife's family. During his travels, he would pack a high-wattage bulb on a lens box to meet the light source needs for reading and writing.
And almost all of his protagonists have fled or lost their homes: Kura in "Outer Darkness" runs away from incest situations; Sutry exchanged the house for a ship. He is not good at describing Romeo and Juliet in the countryside, nor about communities, customs, and laws. It was only in middle and old age that McCarthy made up his mind. After 1976, McCarthy lived mainly in El Paso, as well as Santa Fe.
Did McCarthy learn the secret recipe for getting along with things during the migration? McCarthy showed an extraordinary focus, holding the "verb" firmly, without distraction, paying little attention to the actions and scenes outside the area of action. At the same time, his sense of smell of nature, geography, common sense bursts out anytime and anywhere, and they occur at any time by the things in his hands, by the environment around him, and these are neither psychological nor allegorical, but foreshadowed but immediately present.
Clifford Edward Clark In The American Family Home: 1800–1960, Clifford Edward Clark Jr. argues that the late 18th-century fondness for Greek architecturally ordered family life was a reversal of the chaos of immigration. Ten years after the establishment of the Tennessee Project, Knoxville, the first-generation Southerner elder Arthur Obie ("The Orchard Watcher") guarded the decaying orchard, he guarded the tradition and resisted the invasion of modern civilization, but his power was too weak. And the third generation of southerners has very little understanding of the past.
McCarthy merely magnified the contradictions of American House, and he seemed to choose individuality from individuality and consistency, freedom from freedom and inheritance, but in fact he chose a new model or system: he resisted the sedentary tradition that originated in the yeomanry, and did everything in his power to reject the "closed" home. In other words, McCarthy liberated the taboos of home to a limited extent. He may think that home does not exist, and that everyone should become a pioneer, but he is also a pioneer without a sense of mission.
"In this harsh and neutral realm, all phenomena are blessed with a strange equality, and no thing, a spider, a stone, a blade of grass can claim priority. The clarity of these objects conceals their intimacy, because the eye always sees, and here everything is shining with the same light, shrouded in shadow, and in this realm of equal optical conditions, all preferences will seem strange, and people and rocks are endowed with unpredictable intimacy. McCarthy reveals it in Meridian of Blood.
As Terri Witek puts it, at the height of his power, he turned himself into the angel of the house, controlling the style and performance of the house: he truly became the moral core of his home. Of course, to build such a family space on a town of reeds and hides is to try to change the universe, and this is forbidden.
We, disorder and good
"Since Adam was born, no one has been luckier than me. Everything that happened to me was perfect. I'm not kidding. Whenever I am penniless or destitute, something happens. Time and time again, enough to make you superstitious about it. McCarthy said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
This passage is likely to be underestimated. Or it could be misinterpreted as follows: McCarthy's success depended entirely on fate. In fact, combined with McCarthy's life, we can roughly conclude that the reason why "luck" is regarded as important and primary is not fate, but that McCarthy has gained recognition in one step through his spontaneous and natural creation, and he has actually changed little. And on this point, we can even make a hasty judgment, McCarthy has proved his greatness and worthiness with large volumes of pen practice time and again, he has never tampered with and fabricated what he knows and feels, and he has never left the land where he grew up.
One day at two or three o'clock in the morning, McCarthy's young son John slept in the guest bed of the hotel, while McCarthy was still awake, and he looked at the quiet El Paso, and the train was passing in the distance. McCarthy had a whim, what would El Paso look like a hundred years later? Volcano, John, what happened to all this? Inspired by this, McCarthy began writing The Long Road. Later, McCarthy admitted that "The Long Road" was a story of father-son love, but they never said "I love you." What's even more amazing is that "The Long Road" appropriates his dialogue with his youngest son, John, intact. John said, "Dad, what if I die for you? I said, "I want to die too." He said, "So you're going to be with me?" I said, "Yes, so I can be with you." ”
"The Long Road" book cover
Fathers, children, and a plethora of characterless cannibals all make up the characters of The Long Road. Fathers and children, trudging and crawling on an endless road, had to avoid cannibals for safety, and had to resort to everything they could to survive by means of everything they could. Once they are lost, they become food for cannibals, who slaughter them, rape them, and finally eat them. On the way, they occasionally meet people who have gone missing, and they seem to die soon.
"Because death has come, there is nothing more to say.
I will never leave you behind.
I don't care, it doesn't make sense to me. If you're happy, just be like a bitch who steals people, and when I follow someone else, he can give me something you can't afford to give.
Death is not like a lover.
Like, death is a lover. ”
The father checks the map every day, measuring the progress of the journey, while the child is his eyes and ears. They lay on their stomachs on the ground and listened to the movements around them, in case someone attacked, and if it was a large group, the ground would tremble noticeably. They searched shopping baskets, ashes from dangerous buildings, tin trash cans, but found nothing, only some hard-to-decipher gypsy symbols. Finally found ham, peas, peaches, whiskey... They were fed. When he had nothing, his father had to make up the symbol of the "torch" in order for them to survive.
"I only said we wouldn't die, I didn't say we weren't hungry.
But we don't eat human flesh.
Do not eat, do not eat human flesh.
Don't eat anyway.
Don't eat, don't eat anyway.
Because we are good people.
Right.
And we have torches.
Yes, we have torches.
Good. ”
As the journey deepened, the child's body became thin and his throat became dry. However, in McCarthy's imagination, they are always unhurried, always a species that has evolved perfectly to achieve self-actualization. This species is the prophet.
In more than a dozen novels, McCarthy has constantly adjusted the narrative, style, and weak genre, but the main form is consistent. He will use the interweaving of dialogue and narrative: the dialogue body contains partial conflict, but its main role is more like conveying meaningless attitudes, cunning, random, silent; The narrative contains not only some conflicts, but also the narrator's mobilization of words and perceptions, the depiction of scenes that are not bound by the larger landscape, and the apparently omnipresent McCarthy proverb.
McCarthy completely rejects the presence of the story more thoroughly than the last modern Hemingway, and the center of his horizon shifts from characters to landscapes and then to "nothingness." Readers cannot find in McCarthy's work the taste and mood that the story should bring, or the system that people have developed in modern society. McCarthy is everyday, chattering, deductive, and violent. In itself, in a stylistic sense, it is closed: it does not unexpectedly capture its reader, it requires the reader to step into its perceptual coexistence beforehand. Fortunately, most readers do not go for that single text, and the perception after "postmodern" is very eclectic as in the early days of modernism.
The 1981 MacArthur Genius Award led McCarthy to meet scientists in various fields, including Roger Payne and Gell-Mann. He would rather spend his time on scientists than on literary scholars. McKinsey was very curious about knowledge, especially knowledge related to the body. According to one of his early cherished interviews, McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein than himself and his books. He has never taught, written the news, held book clubs and book launches, and rarely given interviews. Much of McKinsey's literature about animals, landscapes, and the wildness of people comes from this.
A year ago, Cormac McCarthy published a pair of novels, "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," during the interval of the near month. The two novels once tell the tormented lives of Bobby West and Alicia West, and their doomed love.
The Passenger book cover
"Passenger" and "Stella Maris" both begin with a horror story. In 1980, salvage diver Bobby was tasked with exploring the wreckage of a sunken plane in the shallow waters of Mississippi, where black boxes, flight bags, and the body of a passenger could not be found, and then Bobby was hunted by the FBI, and seemed to be hunted by all the ghosts of the 20th century. In the fall of 1972, at the Stella Maris Catholic Sanatorium in Wisconsin, 20-year-old Alicia, who was still pursuing a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, while on the other side of the world, Bobby lay in the hospital, he was diagnosed with brain death. "Passenger" is relatively stylistic, while "Stella Maris" is based on seven conversations between Alicia and a psychiatrist.
Stella Maris book cover
As early as the mid-1980s, McCarthy began working on The Passenger. In 2005, McCarthy wrote to the editor that a novel about the New Orleans salvage crew was nearing completion. McCarthy is said to have excelled in multi-line work, that is, working on multiple books or multiple jobs at the same time. McCarthy wrote with restraint and avoided taking the reader to feel. It's a lot like his personality, not in a hurry, in control of his own rhythm.
Alicia West was awarded the Knot of Gordios, Resonance, Schizophrenia, Autism, Anorexia, Nihilism, and fell in love with her brother. Alicia is suspected of being a lesbian, masterful of music, and conversed in mathematics, which only pushes it into the abyss. "Verbal wisdom can only help you get somewhere, there's a wall, and you can't see this wall without knowing the numbers. The people on the other side of the wall may seem strange to you, but you will never understand their tolerance for you. They will be friendly, or not, depending on their nature. "Alicia expresses her obsession with mathematics in her novels. The two novels represent McKinsey's renewed focus on science, with both heroes and heroines related to quantum physics and their fathers involved in the Manhattan Project.
McKinsey is a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, which studies the science of complex systems, and as a sign of support for the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy donated more than $200,000 from the auction of the Olivetti Lettera 32 manual typewriter. He transformed the space of the Instituto de Santa Fe, with dark wooden cabinets, gilded mirrors, a Newton portrait of Alberto Escalello, arranged much like the estate of the border trilogy. In public areas, the click of McCarthy's old typewriter can often be heard, and many researchers have noticed this, and the young doctors are almost completely unrecognizable when they first hear it.
In his office at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy read the works of his friends Lisa Randall, Lawrence Krauss and others. In 2017, McCarthy co-authored "The Kekulé Problem," a paper focusing on the dreams of German chemist August Kekulé and the problem of language. In addition, he studies urban ecosystems with Geoffrey West.
Needless to say, McCarthy certainly believed that science had beauty. In his view, great science and great writing involve curiosity, risk-taking, and saying things that most people would say wrong. Amazingly, McCarthy believed that science comes from the subconscious. "Aesthetics is indeed related to mathematics and science. This is also one reason why Paul Dirac got into trouble. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century, and like other physicists, Dirac truly believed that if between two things, one logical and one beautiful, then they were more inclined to choose the one that was aesthetic because it seemed more real. When Richard Feynman put together the latest version of his quantum electrodynamics, Dirac didn't think it was real because it looked ugly and messy. He linked great mathematical or physical theories as unclear and inelegant. But he was wrong. There is no fixed rule. ”