Esteem

What most impresses me about my friend Roger's blog and his writing in general is his ability to extrapolate an entire essay from only a newspaper article. That ability does not come easily to me. I thought about such on Monday night as I finished Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. There is a scene towards the conclusion where one of the characters is looking for work, walking through the southern countryside and he encounters a herd of 100 or so hogs being led to the market by a trio of drovers. The character falls along, asking about employment, when suddenly the hogs panic and in their fright stampede off of a bluff taking one of the drovers with them. The physical gravity and horror of the situation are delivered with almost medical precision: these were the just words as opined by Flaubert.