Somewhere in the middle of The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy relates the curious tale of a man driven rootless, near mad, by a series of cascading tragedies that end with the death of his young son in a tornado, a death for which the man bears some responsibility. McCarthy figures the man as a kind of mystic, one who has dwelled in Nietzsche’s abyss to return no more. The man comes to rest under a miraculously half-destructed church, a church whose roof stands on three corners alone. Sitting where he can be crushed by the roof, the man begins to study the Bible furiously:
He pored over the record not for the honor and glory of his Maker but rather to find against Him, To seek out in nice subtleties some darker nature. False favors. Small deceptions. Promises forsaken or a hand too quickly raised. To make cause against Him, you see. He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up by the very void to which we wished to stay opposed (153).
Daring death, the man finds spiritual mission, a God from which no favor can be courted, only swift, unjust death To me, this is the spiritual lure of conspiracy: a power so great that its boundaries cannot be mapped, its depths not plumbed. A power made up of men, but a power that transforms these men themselves into demons.
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