The Most Important Sentence I Read This Year

Varied Thrush. Photo by the author

Four words. That’s all it is. Four words, four syllables. I came across it late in my year of reading. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was published in October, his first novel in sixteen years. Like so much of McCarthy’s work The Passenger is dense, sonorous, achingly beautiful at times, esoteric and alluringly cryptic in many places, replete with dizzying conversations that chisel away at intractable questions…