Suttree passed by, in these days moving through the streets like a dog at large. Such old things strangely new, the city seen through eyes unscaled. The repetition of its own images had washed out and leveled it and he saw upright and arrant on the dead alluvial grimmer shapes, the city of his remembrance a ghost like him and he himself a shape among the ruins, prodding dried artifacts like some dim paleontrope among the bones of fallen settlements where no soul's left to utter voice at what has passed.
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (page 246)
- Arrant - an old-fashioned or literary adjective used as an intensifier to stress that someone or something is completely, utterly, or notoriously bad.
- Alluvial - relating to, composed of, or found in alluvium--the loose sand, soil, silt, gravel, or clay left behind by running water such as rivers, streams, or floodwaters.
- Paleontrope - a rare, literary coinage--most famously used by Cormac McCarthy in his novel Suttree--to describe a person who feels like an ancient remnant, ghost, or relic wandering through modern or ruined landscapes.
