Blood Meridian

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>He rode out alone on the desert and sat the horse and he and the horse and the dog looked out across the rolling scrubland and the barren peppercorn hills and the mountains and the flat brush country and running plain beyond where four hundred miles to the east were the wife and child that he would not see again. His shadow grew long before him on the banded wash of sand. He would not follow.
Bravo for getting me to feel sorry for a ruthless killer

>>7566603
>What did he mean by this?

Chance sure is super scary and edgy.

Seriously though:
-Chance is everywhere
-War is a part of everywhere
-War is a part of chance
-War is the god of chance because people die in war and aint that a bitch

What's he a judge of?

>>7566679
Hush now he has the ears like a fox

>>7566648
>He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would ever be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

I don't pity him. He made his choice long ago to live and die following his own road and yet in the end he amounted to nothing more than another victim in the Judge's game.

>>7566668
War "admits no argument concerning the notion fate," yet how could it be that the "whole universe labored" to bring a man to his death in war? What is meant by the statement that the selection "is a preference absolute and irrevocable," what preference would war as the ultimate game of chance have for those it selects?

What is it about war, specifically, that allows it to contain within it both its own authority and the justification for that authority?

What is the "larger will" that binds men and how does war force a unity of existence? What does this phrase mean, "unity of existence"?

>>7566679
>In this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that this proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?
Is this why he will, or rather must, exist forever? Must he be the ultimate witness to the ultimate game?

>>7566717
Dutch-speaker (the master race) reporting in.

>>7566679
The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he [the kid] could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie [the judge, as explained in the previous paragraph] current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.

>>7566724
Where did ya learn Dutch?
>That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day

>>7566722
The answer to every single question you asked is chance, except one

>What is it about war specifically

It's dramatic. This is rhetoric, not philosophy.

>War admits no argument concerning fate

It doesn't need to make an argument concerning fate, it doesnt need to make an argument period. It is how it is, chance.

>whole universe labored...
Chance (also known as fate) brings man to his death in war.

>preference absolute and irrevocable..
Again you cant argue with war, chance, fate, etc, they are vague abstractions that he is prettying up dramatically.

>what preference
Chance, whatever chance decides is the preference. There is no reason (or argument), because its fucking chance

>larger will that binds men..
chance

>how does war force a unity of existence
everyone is equal in chance

>unity of existence
a pattern among things that exist besides merely existing
aka
chance

>>7566775
>everyone is equal in chance
Except Elrod

>>7566788
If that's true then this whole speech is retarded. You can take any sentence in that monologue and then just add at the end "except Elord".

>The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his,
Except Elrod.

>>7566791
Not the guy who asked the questions just saying Elrod seemed to get fucked more than most.