McCarthy's real wisdom isn't that scars prove something happened—any fool knows that. Rather, he's suggesting that without these marks, memory itself becomes suspect, slippery, almost fictional. We live so much in our heads that we can convince ourselves our worst moments were dreams or exaggerations, but a scar is a fact written on flesh that our mind cannot rewrite. A woman who survived a car accident might find that years of therapy help less than the thin line on her forehead, which every mirror visit confirms: *yes, that was real, and I lived through it*.