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Flow, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is when “what slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self… Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward.” Besides running a marathon, reading excellent writing is the experience most likely to bring me to a state of “flow.” I forget about the setting and circumstances and characters that buttress my existence. Hours spill over. I get happy.

Sections of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the first of his Border Trilogy, pulled me into this state of flow. Perhaps because I read the novel over a series of droning sessions at the last scientific conference I attended (an experience antithetical to flow), I was inspired to do an experiment of sorts on the experience of flow in this McCarthy novel. The study-design was dubious in that there was no control, no peer-review process, no randomizing; it is probably not repeatable. But who cares about all that in the realm of literary criticism where repeatability is a sin called cliché or outright plagiarism? So, while the results of the study are certainly not generalizable, they are peculiar and revelatory. I put an exclamation point on the page corners when I perceived flow to be happening. After McCarthy’s shuddering finale, “passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come” and a Guinness (the only beverage I could find as rich as McCarthy’s prose), I tabulated the exclamation points for qualitative analysis to determine what for me manifests in literary “flow.”

More than fourteen passages share “flow” structure similar to this:

Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been. (23)

All of the exclamation marked sentences that pushed me forward into flow had several things in common: 1) few or no commas, 2) only the conjunction “and” partitioning multiple clauses, 3) a galloping quality. To read these sections brought me to breathlessness; one sentence might run the length of a paragraph without a break. Another example:

He held the horse’s face against his chest and he could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the arteries and he could smell the fear and he cupped his hand over the horse’s eyes and stroked them and he did not stop talking to the horse at all, speaking in a low steady voice and telling it all that he intended to do and cupping the animals eyes and stroking the terror out. (103)

And and and, I feel like a stuttering child is telling me a fantastical story, imagining the next turn of plot while they perseverate “and, and”—and I am drawn in and I too am a child breathless with wonder and I don’t want the momentum to ever stop and I want desperately to know how the over-reaching sentence with all its ambition and complicated arrangement of clauses will resolve and when it does I am tempted to read it again like a child is tempted to run again to the top of the slide as soon as they have tumbled down. So goes flow. “All the Pretty Horses” is the title of a lullaby, after all. That we catch child-like wonder is well-intended.

McCarthy employs long-anded sentences when he describes his hero John Grady’s interactions with horses, Grady’s romance with his star-crossed love Alejandra, in descriptions of the wind, the sun, and the starry firmament. The novel is about a child’s loss of innocence, not the loss of wonder. So, in addition to bringing readers like me to a state of flow, the unusual sentence style brings attention to central motifs in the novel: all the prettiness of horses, the tragedy of impossible love and, and the breathtaking raw emptiness of nature. The style evokes the way it actually feels to witness wonders—wild horses, a star-blazing night sky, hundreds of miles of a dark cattle range.

In the presence of a wonder, the consciousness of self diminishes and the boundaries of being are pushed forward with the momentum, which McCarthy simulates with additive phrasing so that we are propelled literarily at the unknowable other—into the wilderness of imagination into places and people and experiences we want to keep exploring, keep riding, keep reading—a heady flight difficult to land. I’m not sure McCarthy successfully does, or that he even tries to, put his reader gently on the ground with All the Pretty Horses. The novel is beautifully turbulent, even untamed.