Cormac McCarthy Answers Questions For the Washington Post's "On Parenting" Blog

This article is part of the The Great Authors Series series.

Entrust your flesh to ruminant saints who sing from their throats and swaddle every toddling moment in linen. Tie weights around your child's limbs and sink him down to benthic misery to be taught by boneless hunger without a name, You have failed. Life whole considered is a single process of acclimation to misery at a pace that does not kill prematurely. Failure is a guarantee. The gnats slowly gathering in the corners of our eyes by moments and years. War will come or famine or a gradual sloughing of meaning as an automobile splaying out by rust and rain in the grass of some forgotten lot. Did they not have song circle at the gym daycare will be carved on no white holy picket.

It makes no difference what a child can learn from a game. The world will teach toothwise and stare with eyes rimmed red with hate. Kindness invested in flesh same as empathy in the harrowed loam of our soonways residual bodies is worse than waste. One of the greatest mistakes a parent can make is to tame the animal heart. Rude things will visit your son or daughter be they in darkness with hard hands or in the light of day with a knifehid smile. A whole world of lapidaries awaiting with tools of various violences to polish your children into radiance if only you step aside. In due time so you will.
Worse even than to coddle is to invest the poison that afflicts you upon that phlegmatic miracle now risen lissome from the clay. Do not bring it down into the dark grottoes you inhabit. It will find its own way and by its voluntary degradations. Your clattersome bones will spill from the same wagon and entangle with the same roots whatever you choose. Does it matter then? Nothing would. But if you were still anything at all you might be glad you were forgotten and not yet residing in a bitter moment for another lifetime or becoming the poison itself indelible and seeping through hands over calamitous centuries.

Without the particular context and claims of your deeds I cannot refute this man nor side with you against his warnings. Have you killed? Will you kill again? My suggestion is you should. Get your hands around his throat and squeeze. Put your thumbs into his eyes until he kicks and lies still. Regard that limp wretched thing that was a man and now commences the gradual deactivation of all inner luminance. While it sets forth on its course of dissolution remind yourself that this is good. A thousand worms will have their feast and a billion cells will paint their murals over his congealed innards. So have you brought silence to your household and a miracle made where life will teem anew and carry away by rain and wind and scuttling the last benevolent purpose of this man.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)