I find his exploration of dark matters to be uniquely stimulating and useful in a variety of thought experiments. Take The Road, for example. The notion of assessing the probabilities that you'll have enough ammunition to either kill multiple assailants, or alternatively, need to keep the ammunition to kill yourself and your son seems sickening and pointless to explore to some people. Taken seriously and with an open mind, it can invoke serious contemplation of your values, what life means to you, what compassion can really mean, how you take what you have for granted, and more. As awful as…
Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian: War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. -- Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. -- In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it…
> It felt to me that the family that takes in the boy are not bad people. What family? You really believe the man and woman who took in the boy had a "family"? A world where boy's own mother abandoned him and his father to kill herself because there was no hope. A world where there are no plants, animals, fish, etc left. A world where a a woman gives birth and then she and her friends cook the fetus over a campfire. You think in a world where there is no food, no possibility of food, where everyone is either starving to death or cannibalizing, that there is a happy family? It's a world where…
> The boy offers to give the man his pistol but the man tells him to keep it. That indicates the man is not trying to trick him. Yes and the nice cannibal they killed offered to give them food and shelter. Remember how nice that cannibal was? The pistol was worthless and if I remember correctly, it didn't even have a bullet left. Of course he let him keep it. It's no threat. > Talking about odds in a fictional story is misguided. No. It's a matter of determining what is most likely. > The odds are 100% whatever the writer intended. Yes. The author wrote everything that led up to the…
> I obviously can't argue further as I haven't read it. You should. It's the best of its kind in my opinion. > I will remark that different people will react to the same material variously uplifted or beaten-down, and neither reaction is less valid (unless they just misunderstood the plot). I'm open to people having subjective feelings - like whether they enjoyed it, they found it too graphic, not graphic enough, etc. But uplifting is different. There has to be something concrete to back up the feeling of being uplifted. > Personally, I tend to find depictions of nobility and perseverance…
It could be clownish and a caricature. I enjoyed The Road but it makes me think of a critique of sci fi I read once, wherein masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones. Some books tackled this by demonstrating the presumptive and flawed approach sci fi writers take to biospheres / space stations / generation ships for example (Voyage from Yesteryear, A Half Built Garden) where despite all the engineering, the biosphere suffers. I suppose a part of why Dune made such waves was that it took a very human and ecological perspective…
I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean. The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting. Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to…
There is no work from Miyazaki that should be more relevant to us on HN than Shuna no Tabi (シュナの旅, Shuna's Journey). It was published during Nausicaa's run and has similar themes to Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke. It's certainly more brutal. It reads like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", and the themes are incredibly prescient for the world we're about to be living in [1]. It has direct relevance to everyone on HN. https://archive.org/details/shuna-no-tabi-complete-translate... It's a hidden gem and often overlooked. Spoiler: [1] . . . [1] rot13(Vg'f onfrq ba n Gvorgna sbyxgnyr, ohg…
Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed. If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms. [0] I'm digging way back…
> But the love between the father and his son persists to the very end. So what? Of course the love between a father and son persists. It's only natural. But that's not the point of the book. The book is about finding hope. The father is desperately trying to save his son. To find hope for his son. He thinks there is hope along the coast. That's why they are on "the road". When they reach the coast, they find a leaden sea holding no life. All marine life is dead. They find no hope. There, cannibals that were hunting the father and son shoot the father with an arrow and the father dies. The…