As promised, I now take up some of the philosophical and ethical problems posed by Cormac McCarthy’s remarkable novel, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. In doing so, it’s important to note that Blood Meridian is open to any number of readings. In fact, the twenty or so intellectual historians who discussed it in Cambridge last week—at the annual IHG seminar—had myriad, often contradictory interpretations of the book. Blood Meridian is a window onto the western canon, from the Bible to Shakespeare to Milton to Nietzsche to Freud. It’s also a “western,” or rather, an anti-western in Read more