A thought on the film No Country for Old Men

In No Country for Old Men, the killer Anton deals in consequences. He is the harbinger of the heartless world, a bringer of death who does not decide who lives and dies. To his mind, what you're doing and where you find yourself traces back to either chance or to some choice you made. He has no patience for ambiguity; fortunes hinge on the flip of a coin and once you call it, results are sure to follow. In this story, Anton's primary target is the hunter Llewellyn Moss.

Moss, now finding himself the prey, resists the inevitable, plotting his escape as best he can given what little wiggle room he has. He acts, and when acted upon, he counters. If ultimately the outcome falls to chance, he will throw his weight on the scale and make sure his chance is the fighting kind.

Sheriff Bell reflects on both men: Permanence and change, fate and self-determination weigh on his mind. He sees men like Anton as evidence the light is fading from this world. After fate claims Moss and untethered chance visits Anton, Bell is left awake in a world that's always been dark and cold, dreaming of the succession of humble men like him who can't do much about it.

Maybe some other time, some other place

I'm abandoning a book: Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change. Ninety pages and a few days in, I concede that the book's loosely structured, note-like narrative is a problem. So is the actual train of thought Burke is on.

Written during the Great Depression--between giant wars and amid economic turmoil--one of Burke's major themes is that people's orientations are changing. But not simply that; he elaborates a great deal on a great many things. The specifics of his ideas, however, are fixed in the time during which he wrote, and don't resonate enough for me now, which is odd both for me as the reader and for him as author, given that he emphasizes context so much.

I suspect I misread him, though, given the book's title, because I find myself wishing he had written more generally, that he had supposed not that our orientations were changing right then, but that they are always changing. Right?

I've read some of Burke's other stuff, very much enjoyed it and plan to revisit it soon.