November 24, 2007 [No Country for Old Men]

Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats concluded it was No Country for Old Men, who yearn to be "out of nature" and become an immortal thing—or at least an "artifice of eternity," a golden mechanical bird like in the fairytale singing of "what is past, or passing, or to come." They want the "sages" who "come from the holy fire" to teach them, to change hearts "sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal" so that they can be that golden thing, that fire.

And at the end of the movie the tired sheriff tells us a dream of following his father into the past where the father is "the younger man," and he's carrying fire in a horn and moving farther up the trail into the mountain, where he'll wait for his son. I couldn't stop the sudden tears and sat through most of the credits. What a desire, in the midst of so much evil, to rise in flame up out of time and be a thing that sings of eternity.

Yes, that wish is "artifice"—but to accept it, to see it not as the bare facts of the movie's one-man apocalypse—or of our willingness to be duped by apocalypse and call it, heads or tails—means that the desire is for something you can hold on to in the dark, a truth seen only in artifice—something, as holy as it is, made by human hands. And I know, I know: made like the killing machine that sends the bolt into the brain and drops us like stones—but big deal: the most evil can do is to kill us in empty pride, as if everything else couldn't—and there goes another poet insisting that Death be not proud—but I saw the widow all by herself with evil sit there heroically and see that all Death has is a dull tool, like a hammer, the kind of thing anyone can pick up and bring down. And her refusal to call it, heads or tails, is the first step into the sheriff's dream.

So maybe the poet's a fool, every work he gives or becomes just a dream made of a younger man—Yeats reminds us that "an aged man is but a paltry thing"; but at least, like the sheriff, he knows that he's just a stranger passing through, that the world is not his home; and knowing that may be enough: It helps him climb "a golden bough to sing," even as the hammer drops.