Psyche

In this episode, I explore All the Pretty Horses through the image of “a boy is a gun,” drawing on Lacan to think about masculinity, lack, fantasy, and the desperate need to be recognized.

John Grady Cole, Rawlins, and Blevins are boys trying to enter the symbolic world of men, but McCarthy shows how dangerous that passage becomes when masculinity is tied to humiliation, violence, and the need to prove oneself. Blevins becomes the clearest tragedy of this, while John Grady reveals something more complicated: a masculinity that is beautiful, tender, courageous, and still deeply marked by blood.

This episode is about boys, guns, horses, desire, shame, and the question underneath so much male suffering: do I have to become dangerous in order to be seen?

I finished All the Pretty Horses, and before moving into The Crossing, I’m staying a little longer with John Grady Cole.

In this episode, I explore one of the most devastating moments in the novel: John Grady’s killing of the cuchillero in prison and the strange new life that begins afterward “breath to breath.” This is not adulthood as triumph or toughness, but adulthood as wound, survival, and the loss of innocence.

I reflect on how John Grady struggles with the fact that he has killed someone, even in self-defense, and how McCarthy refuses to make violence clean or heroic. Instead, he shows us the unbearable pain of life, the danger of being consumed by sorrow, and the fragile courage of continuing to live one breath at a time.

In this episode, I’m reflecting on one of the darkest sections of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins are taken to Saltillo and the romantic dream of Mexico collapses into violence, corruption, and prison.

I spend time with Pérez’s chilling claim that evil is not merely something inside a person, but “a true thing” that goes about on its own legs. From there, I explore McCarthy’s dark philosophy of evil: evil as visitation, as atmosphere, as something personal and impersonal at the same time.

This is an episode about innocence, violence, adulthood, and what it means to keep carrying some wounded form of goodness through a world where evil is real.

In this episode, I reflect on the end of section two of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady Cole is exhausted, heartbroken, and unsure of what has happened after Alejandra leaves the hacienda. What stood out to me was a small but powerful moment with Rawlins, where male friendship shows up not as some grand emotional speech, but as presence.

I explore the fragility of male friendship in Cormac McCarthy, the limits of stoicism, and the way men often long for connection without knowing how to say it directly. I also connect this to my work as a therapist with men, where so much of the work is helping men practice vulnerability, build real friendships, and find fragile bonds that can help them bear the difficulty of existence.

In this episode, I explore Cormac McCarthy’s dark, postsecular vision of the sacred alongside Carl Jung and David Tacey’s idea of the “darkening spirit.” I reflect on the sacred not as something safely contained by institutional religion or reduced to comfort, goodness, and light, but as the numinous: beautiful, violent, disruptive, terrifying, and transformative.

Drawing on Jung’s provocative claim that organized religion can protect us from a direct experience of God, I think through McCarthy’s landscapes, violence, longing, animals, grief, and mystery as places where the sacred returns after the collapse of easy belief and easy unbelief. This is not an anti-Christian reflection. I share how deeply I’ve been shaped by Christian symbols while also wrestling with why I can no longer affirm a vision of the divine that cannot face evil, shadow, and violence as real powers within the greater whole.

In this episode, I reflect on All the Pretty Horses and the moment John Grady Cole meets Alejandra — not just as a love story, but as a beautiful and tragic opening into adulthood.

I explore how young love, desire, fantasy, emerging sexuality, heartbreak, and betrayal become formative terrain for adolescent boys. Through McCarthy’s world of light and darkness, I think about how longing can illuminate us and blind us, awaken us and wound us, and how therapy can help young men suffer honestly without turning pain into cruelty, cynicism, or contempt. As McCarthy puts it, “the world’s heart beats at some terrible cost,” and much of growing up happens in that painful space “between the wish and the thing.”

In this episode, I reflect on a strange and haunting scene in All the Pretty Horses where John Grady Cole plays pool with the hacendado in what used to be an old chapel. What seems like a small moment opens into something much bigger: the sacred, institutional religion, reason, violence, memory, and the strange ways God may linger in places we think have been emptied out.

I explore McCarthy’s idea that “what is sacred is sacred,” and how the holy may exceed the control of priests, institutions, and rational explanation. This becomes a way into thinking about the post-secular sacred: not a simple return to religion, but also not a flat, disenchanted world where mystery disappears.

Along the way, I also wrestle with the hacendado’s critique of reason, his fear that reason can become monstrous when it tries to master everything, and McCarthy’s larger vision of the sacred as beautiful, violent, terrifying, and impossible to fully control.

In this episode, I reflect on one of the most haunting lines I’ve encountered so far in All the Pretty Horses: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”

As John Grady Cole and Rawlins arrive at the hacienda and begin working with horses, the old man Luis offers this dark, beautiful meditation on war, memory, and the souls of men and horses. I explore how McCarthy complicates any easy nostalgia for the old cowboy world. The horses are beautiful, almost sacred, but they are not innocent. The past is alluring, but it is not pure. And progress does not necessarily mean we have become less violent.

This episode is about horses, war, masculinity, beauty, violence, and the unsettling possibility that human beings may not simply learn war from the outside. Maybe something in us already recognizes it. McCarthy gives us romance without illusion, beauty without innocence, and a vision of the human heart that continues to haunt me.

Cormac McCarthy is often caricatured as a conservative writer, and maybe there’s something to that, but that claim gets reductionistic fast. In this episode, I explore Chapter 7 of Patrick O’Connor’s Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned, “A Maelstrom of Doing and Undoing: McCarthy’s Political Imaginary,” and think through McCarthy as a political writer whose work can’t be easily mapped onto our usual categories.

Rather than giving us a clean ideology, McCarthy forces us to sit with the tension between order and chaos, law and lawlessness, community and exclusion, freedom and violence. I reflect on Blood Meridian, The Orchard Keeper, The Stonemason, Tocqueville, technocracy, fragile dwellings, and the strange dignity of making a world even as it comes undone.

This is McCarthy’s politics: not a platform, not nostalgia, not utopia, but tragic attention to the people and places buried beneath the official story of progress.

In this episode, I use a question Rawlins asks John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses as a doorway into the feeling of being ill at ease in the world. I bring McCarthy into conversation with Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Peter Zapffe, and Thomas Ligotti to wrestle with the strange burden of consciousness, the ache of modern ennui, and the palliatives we need to cope with the sheer difficulty of existence.

This is not an episode about finding a neat cure for the human condition. It’s about asking what it means to live honestly inside discomfort, to recognize that civilization both shelters and wounds us, and to find forms of friendship, art, ritual, love, humor, and courage that help us keep the fire going against the dark.