"The Notion We Are All One is Nonsense"

Cormac McCarthy: Language, Culture, War

1. “A Thousand Years Perfecting”

In the new tranche of Cormac McCarthy’s personal papers acquired last year by the Wittliff Collections and made available to scholars in October of 2025, you’ll find the following note, scrawled in McCarthy’s spidery hand:

For those having difficulty reading McCarthy’s handwriting, the note says: “The moral clarity of the English-speaking people has been a thousand years perfecting. It is a pointless task to imagine such a struggle taking markedly less time than this in some other culture. The notion that we are all as one is nonsense.”

I’ve been thinking about these three sentences since I first encountered them on December 9th of last year. McCarthy is obviously making an observation about language’s influence on culture, but “moral clarity” gives me pause. Is McCarthy suggesting that the English language produced Anglo-Saxon ethics? Or is he suggesting something far more stygian?

I had the honor of taking Old English in my doctoral program. I was mentored by the great Alexandra Olsen, a renowned medievalist who taught Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. So, I can confidently say that there’s no (single) word for morals in Ænglisc.

The closest you will come is Lēof or Gefrēond: loyalty.

Or, perhaps, Wyrd: honor.

Dōm is another possibility. It refers to the Anglo-Saxon sense of familial duty and it’s where we get our word doom. (For example, Alfred the Great's storied Doom Book was a collection of early English law).

But I believe the “moral clarity” McCarthy references in his note is less about action and more about consciousness, less a matter of the existential and more about the phenomenological. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, uses phenomenological concepts, but his existentialism is phenomenology turned inward.

To put it another way, Existentialism asks, “What does it mean to Be?”

Phenomenology asks, “How do we experience that Being?”

While existentialism privileges existence (choice), phenomenology privileges essence (conscious perception).

The two disciplines are related, but their relationship is one of tension, struggle.

Let me explain.