The Resurrection of the Horses
Iberian blood: Mustangs in Utah
Quelle: Danita Delimont/Gallo Images ROOTS Collection/Getty Images
The horse originated in America but only returned there with Columbus. Archaeologists have now discovered that the mustangs may have only needed one horse’s life to reach their ancient North American homeland. The most beautiful horse book in the world tells about it in its own way.
Dhe literature of the late 20th century is not known for shining heroes, but it was the gloomy Cormac McCarthy who created one. A good 30 years ago, in his novel All the Beautiful Horses, he told the story of the Texan John Grady Cole, who loses his grandfather’s farm to modernity and moves to Mexico with a few horses in order to remain a cowboy despite everything.
There is no community between people like there is between horses, he learns from a wise old man there; Unlike humans, horses do not need a sky either. On the one hand because they already have it on earth, on the other hand they would participate in a collective horse soul that makes them immortal. And what if all horses disappeared from the face of the earth? The question is pointless, replies the old man, who may be McCarthy himself. God would never allow the horses to disappear.
Natural history buffs know the old man is wrong. Ironically, in the North American expanses, where God once created the horses, they died out a few thousand years ago, and it was humans who brought them back there. Columbus landed in Central America with horses from Seville, and as an American team of archaeologists has just explained in the specialist magazine “Science”, the mustangs may not have needed more than a horse’s life to find their way back home from there. It is quite possible that the first North American chief was on horseback in the early 16th century – many decades earlier than previously thought.
“In that harmony that is the world itself”
So the conquistadors aren’t just after rats God’s own country brought, and as it now appears, the horses were also much faster than the settlers and their smallpox in the Great Plains: The resurrection of the North American horses took place with the active help of sinful people. Could this have been God’s Colombian plan? Despite all the destruction that has been caused, is there hope for the human race that dreams of eternal life in the hereafter because it cannot understand eternal life in this world?
Matt Damon in 2000’s All the Pretty Horses. Unfortunately, the film fell far short of the book
Quelle: picture alliance/United Archives/Impress
“In the end we shall be healed of all attitudes,” writes Cormac McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses, and John Grady Cole, his shining hero, need not even die for it; it is enough for him to watch God’s most beautiful creatures, the horses. In a dream, he is allowed to walk with them, “in that harmony that is the world itself and that cannot be expressed, but only praised.”
And in another, which he dreams late in the book, he sees the horses pulling through human ruins, “where an order in the world has failed and everything that may have been carved in the stones has long since weathered away”. The horses, however, move “attentively and with great care” in these ruins. Because the foolish people who once lived among these stones brought them here.