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This is part three of episode 305, Carmichael McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and we wanted

to keep talking about this.

Yeah, one of the things I wanted to talk about was a little bit about the concept of regression,

which I think comes up a few times.

It starts at the very beginning of the book where we have an account of the kid.

His father is, let's just read it.

So his folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water, but in truth his father

has been a schoolmaster.

He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost, the boy crouches by the

fire and watches him.

And then we find out that the boy's mother has died in childbirth and that he can't

read or write, and that the child, all history is present in that visage, the child, the

father, of the man.

And I thought of that regression in relation to the tale that the judge tells later about

the harness maker.

The sort of point of that story that we don't have to describe the whole thing is that

a child is deprived of the father because the father is killed before he ever really

knows them.

And the way the judge puts it is, now this son whose father's existence in this world

...