The Catholic imagination of Cormac McCarthy

The Wall Street Journal has a tremendous interview with the notoriously media-shy novelist Cormac McCarthy.

The interviewer asks the author of The Road and Blood Meridian whether he is still a Catholic:

WSJ: You grew up Irish Catholic.

CM: I did, a bit. It wasn’t a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don’t even remember religion ever even being discussed.

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in “The Road” questions and curses?

CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

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