For me, the sense is strongest when I feel a connection to my fellow humans, both those with whom I share the planet today and all those who came before. It’s one reason I’m so fascinated by archaeology — the deeper the past, the deeper my awe and wonder.

The Chauvet cave in southeast France was discovered in 1994, and contains the world’s oldest examples of cave art. Artists painted and engraved horses, aurochs, rhinos, mammoths, lions, leopards, and many other Ice Age animals on the cave walls 32,000-30,000 years ago (in the Aurignacian) and again 27,000-26,000 years ago (Gravettian). Just as in Lascaux, the artists used the natural contours of the cave to accentuate their artwork — the jaw muscles of a horse, the humped shoulder of a bison.

You can’t see these shapes in photographs, and unlike Lascaux there is (as yet) no full-scale modern reproduction to satisfy those of us who won’t ever step through that locked door and enter this ancient cathedral.

This is where Werner Herzog‘s new documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” proves invaluable.

Herzog’s film captures the pristine cave art like no photograph or even 2D movie can. Herzog also includes touching moments of modern humanity, like the experimental archaeologist who plays “The Star Spangled Banner” on a reproduction Ice Age flute, his colleague who dreamed of lions after spending five days in the cave, and the master perfumer who crawls through the brush sniffing for the scent of undiscovered caves.

My only criticism is reserved for the last two minutes of the film, during which Herzog narrates a well-meaning “postscript” that attempts to connect modernity with antiquity via an analogy featuring albino alligators warmed by nuclear power plant effluvium. (No, I didn’t get it either.) After the final cave sequence, it would have been a postscript best left unread.

But when the filmmaker lets light, dark, the cave, and the artists themselves work their ancient magic, the experience is positively numinous.

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs. What truly annoys me, though, is McCarthy’s inconsistent use of apostrophes for contractions. Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading (though I finished The Road in only a few hours). If they made me stop and think about the language, characters, or plot, I wouldn’t object, but they’re merely distracting.

Naturally, this apocalyptic abomination is being made into a “major motion picture.”

I think what bothers me most is how much attention McCarthy and The road have gotten. With more praise and “book of the year” awards than God’s own Bible, you’d think McCarthy had done something deeply original. Well, he hasn’t. Writers like Joyce experimented with alternatives to standard dialogue punctuation, but I would argue that time has proven their experiments a failure.

And there are far superior works that address how we as humans might react to the end of our civilization and the impending extinction of our species. Two of my favorite examples appear at the end of Elizabeth Hand‘s Saffron and Brimstone. “Echo” and “The Saffron Gatherers” explore similar themes of survival amidst the loss of hope without resorting to needless typographical devices.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s annoyed and even a little angry about The Road‘s undeserved success.

The Bibliophile Baker:

What really irritates me is his apparent aversion to punctuation. For a while I was trying to decide why some words deserve apostrophes, and others don’t, but I think I finally figured it out: he puts apostrophe’s for contractions of words + had, but not words + not. i.e. He’d use some markings, but he didnt use others. This to me is both annoying and pretentious.

Bibliobibuli has an excellent analysis of the specific patterns, along with a roundup of the punctuational criticism from around the ‘net.

Literary Kicks may respect Oprah, but nevertheless has some more well-constructed analysis of McCarthy’s assault on the English language.

And with that, I’m hereby inaugurating my list of…

Writers I Would Like to Punch in the Face

• Cormac McCarthy, for being a pretentious twat.
• Philip Pullman, who doesn’t seem capable of creating a sympathetic character, even in books ostensibly written for pre-adults.
• Michael Crichton, whose varied and single-minded obsessions in each book (chaos theory! quantum mechanics! the Japanese!) seemed about as relevant as an elevator operating manual to a Kalahari bushman.

Having actually met enough reasonably well-known writers to think that there’s a greater-than-zero chance that I might also meet those on this list, I should of course note that I’m a pacifist and wouldn’t think of really punching these guys in the nose. Well, maybe Michael Crichton, since if I met him now he’d have to be a zombie…

• Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki)
• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
• Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
• Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas)
• Henry V (Kenneth Branagh)
• 1984 (Michael Radford)
• Dreams (Akira Kurosawa)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson)
• Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón)
• Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster)
• Cloverfield (Matt Reeves / J.J. Abrams)
• Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)
• District 9 (Neill Blomkamp / Peter Jackson)
• Where the Wild Things Are trailer (Spike Jonze)

What’s a trailer doing in an all-time list of favorite movies? Because it’s the single best one and a half minutes of movie-making I’ve ever seen. The actual movie can only be a disappointment…