The Courage to be Constant

I thought I’d take a break from all the heavy Klosterman quotes and go with a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole and his pal Lacey Rawlins as they ride from their home in southern Texas across the border into Mexico in search of work and adventure. Once in Mexico Cole is hired to breed horses for a wealthy Mexican rancher. However, during his stay at the hacienda, Cole develops a romantic relationship with the rancher’s mysterious and beautiful daughter, Alejandra.

In a pivotal scene near the book’s end, John Grady meets with Alejandra’s matriarchal aunt, who has saved his life under the terms that he never see the girl again. In attempting to explain to Cole the gravity of the situation he’s in, she relates the history of her people in Mexico and specifically shares the story of her own forbidden love. A love that ended in alienation and death. In recounting her story the aunt makes this observation:

I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily (p. 235).

I found this to be a particularly powerful book because it told a story where romantic love did not conquer all. Rather, what conquered was family, tradition, and constancy.

John Grady, despite his best efforts to find a way to make his love succeed, ultimately fails and his story ends in a state of lonely wondering. I wonder if McCarthy is onto something rather profound here. We are constantly bombarded by the ephemeral myth that true love can overcome not only the odds, but all meaningful social realities. If your family places certain boundaries upon you, well those boundaries should be crossed if you are really in love. If your station in life will not permit your love, well your station be damned. If your prior commitments to being a certain type of person — whether it be of character or value — if it is for true love, then it is right to abandon even yourself. This myth teaches us that it is only in the arms of the one we “love” that we will find the beatific vision, the sublime nexus of truth, goodness, and beauty. But McCarthy casts a vision of a place where romantic love does not win in the end. This is a vision of life where what truly counts is one’s prior commitments to character and tradition.

It seems this vision of the failure of romance is more true than the myth of conquering romance so prevalent in our culture. And it so in two distinct ways. First, this just seems to be the way things go. When people choose romance over family, tradition, station in life, or character, they inevitably lose more than they gain. There is a suffering that is felt in very deep and lasting ways. And the “true romance” often fades leaving one, in the end, wandering alone. The second reason McCarthy’s vision is more true is that it points to a truer reality: Fleeting romantic sentiments are not nearly as substantial and meaningful, and thus true, as are one’s commitments to family, tradition, station, and character. It turns out that the truly courageous act was for Alejandra to get on her train and leave John Grady Cole behind her. But because John Grady was a good American, who did not understand a courage premised on sacrifice for tradition and character rather than romance, he was left alone and confused.

Where Christ has said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?” McCarthy has added, “Or to gain true love only to wonder the desert alone.” And for this we should be grateful.