Some stories speak of adventure. Some speak of love. Some, still, speak of loss. We read them when we should be paying attention or when we should be sleeping. They are many. Every so often, however, a story comes along that speaks the truth. These rarities show you the world as plainly and as horribly and as beautifully as we all require (but rarely desire) as inhabitants of it. This is one such story.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
-Cormac McCarthy, The Road
I first read The Road last spring after buying it used for $7.50 (turns out this wasn’t even a deal, but I had to have it then) at a secondhand bookstore in Morro Bay. I underlined it as I went; I wish I could have underlined the entire book, but if everything is underlined, then nothing is, I suppose. It was one of those books that, when you finish, you can do nothing but close yourself in your room, lie on your floor, and stare at the ceiling until it begins to warp and your eyes begin to sting. Then, you take a deep breath, sit up, and start it again.
The Road is a survival story in the literal sense—after a mysterious apocalypse has left the world covered in ashes, a father and his son, armed only with a pistol with two bullets and a shopping cart full of cans and blankets, journey South along the side of an interstate highway in hopes to find warmer weather along the southern coastline of a destroyed United States. And they are not the only ones out there. The father must struggle with being realistic with his son while trying to keep the shattered fragments of his son’s innocence alive in a world plagued with disease, hostile cannibals, and pungent reminders of a world now gone. But it’s also a survival story of the spiritual sense. We read through the father’s struggle to keep his son’s will to live alive when the father knows that life could be gone at any second, and more frighteningly, that he will be the one who has to end it. “Carry the fire,” he tells his son. Keep the flame inside yourself alive for one more day. One more day, every day.
People who have read The Road, in either school or in their free time, say that it is a sad book. And it is. It is a sad book, sure. But it’s so, so beautiful in it’s sadness. The eloquence and tact with which McCarthy (also author to No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian) so miraculously constructs the world as it can only be shown in desolation knows no equal. The brokenness of the world and of the family is beautifully paralleled by brokenness in sentence structure and lack of punctuation (I love sentence fragments and stylistic run-ons, wow, they’re my favorite). To pinpoint in words McCarthy’s mastery of description would be a task infinitely more arduous than I have the ability to dictate, so I give you another quote:
“A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up….He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”
*internal literary screaming*
Brief and mystical, The Road is an austere perspective on both a post-apocalyptic pilgrimage and the importance of love in the horrific depths of human depravity. It is terse and brutal and not for the fait of hearted. It is only for those who are not afraid. It is only for those bold enough to carry the fire.