Cormac McCarthy's The Road (to what it means to be human)

Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic tale The Road compels you to travel to places you might not want to go. The slow moving story traces the agonizing journey of a boy and his father who walk across a barren, hellish landscape toward the death of all things. Along the way, they struggle to remember and to act as the "good guys" in a landscape haunted with roving bands of "bad guys" who threaten their survival (and the survival of their identity) at every turn in the tortured road.

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay."

(P. 77 - the man has just killed one of the bad guys)

The Road cuts life to the bone in search of the essence of life - that which survives until the bitter end - perhaps the foundation of life and or love and hope. McCarthy's experiment or perhaps parable makes its home among our most terrible fears about the thin veil of modern sophistication straining against a postmodern universe of nihilism and despair. I have been impressed of late at the proliferation of apocalyptic tales that one reviewer theorizes cropped up in the wake of 9-11. All of them seem more to me about our present than some nightmare of a future. The Road journeys through the landscape of our lives, asking the kind of penetrating, uncomfortable questions that we've been too anesthetized (by comfort) to ask.

"They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe into it being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."

(P. 57 - the man's wife leaves them both for death)

McCarthy invites us to explore the ashen barrenscape of life without labels, where the labels have ceased to carry meaning because even the memory of the things the names represented has vanished. The names of people, for instance, relationships between people, the names of dates and years, species of animals long extinct, and plants and foods that have vanished from a burning, cold planet. The Road points to a destiny worse than death - a road that leads to annihilation of existence and memory - of nearly any meaning humanity could have imagined in our sojourn on planet earth.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of it's referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

(P. 89 - by the fire at camp)

On the Road, we experience only the silent, menacing present - all past and future have been obliterated. Stories of these time frames have been exposed for the lies that could not protect us from our inevitable end - books are good only as fuel for the dying fire. And our beleaguered anti-heroes choose only when they will die - most likely by suicide - as they walk from oblivion into oblivion. Yet on they walk, improbably, as the man blows on the embers of the "fire" he claims the boy, especially, carries within him.

It is not the fire of the scorched earth, but a fire of warmth and light, that keeps the two wanderers alive in body and spirit on each successive, relentless cold night. Like their campfires, the crushing reality of despair mutes this fire within - yet it stubbornly refuses to wink out forever while there is yet one human being to tend it. The man lives only that the fire within the boy will never go out, and we know from early on that there will not be enough fuel for the fire within both of them.

The Road defines humanity as a pilgrim species, forever on the move as we bear this fire. One of my favorite passages reveals the way our life in the present reshapes our past into a future we stride into with each step we take in the present. When we don't know where we are going, we refuse to stop (though some of us do refuse) and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Though we never learn the details of the catastrophe that brought humanity to its knees, The Road renders this memory moot in relation to the task we face in each present moment. McCarthy beckons us to step into the eternity of each unknown moment free of the determination of the past or of the future.

"Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake up from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning and thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

(P. 131 on dreams, reality and memory)

Without spoiling the ending, I mention here only that McCarthy invites us to consider the monstrous cost of attempting to control or to assure our destiny, or the destiny of those we love. The Road paints a monochrome vision of hope and also of grace in a harsh environment that appears to deny both. We cannot know what the end of the road looks like, or where it leads. But the boy, especially, asks the man in us all to count the cost of looking too far down the road.

I was glad to be released from this dark and haunting vision, and yet it remains with me like the smell of smoke in my clothes after sitting by a campfire at night. While there are still fish in the waters, birds in the sky, and cattle on the green earth, a boy and a man whisper relentlessly in my ear to attend carefully to the map of the universe borne by every form of life - including my own - on my leg of the journey. We, too, carry a fragile but relentless fire, capable of ravaging or renewing the earth and others on this journey who wonder whether we are bad or good.

Misty Mountain Musings

Sunday, July 25, 2010
Misty Mountain Campground, Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia

We have holed up here for a few days (since arriving Wednesday night, late), mostly lazing around in the intense heat and humidity. We did get to Charlottesville on Thursday and took the walking tour of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Ate some ice cream afterwards. The kids spent some time in the pool here and have been glad to have the WiFi access and their iTouches and cell phones. I think we've all read a little bit, except for the boys.

Each of the four mornings we've spent here, I've gotten exactly what I came for - peaceful mornings by a little creek in the woods to read and think in silence, while the cicadas and birds sang to me their love songs. Most nights, Vicki and I have been able to walk together (though it's been a purposeful walk to get points). The kids seem to be getting along well together - especially Eli and Elijah.

We've taken a number of calls from people in our church - about someone threatening suicide, another leaving the church because we aren't the kind of pastors they wanted us to be, the sadnesses attendant to the dissolving of a marriage union, and whether to hold worship in the Grove this morning when it's going to be another scorcher.

For some reason, we have not felt too overwhelmed by this seeming inability to "get away" on our vacation. Thanks to the WiFi, I uploaded Ruthann's sermon notes and Pat's weekly announcements to the church web site on Thursday. Two things come to mind: the community of people we have come to love so much is never far from us, and we are indeed well away here in this place of serenity.

I've finished three books so far on this trip. The first, a collection of sayings of fourth century desert fathers edited by Thomas Merton, has profoundly reminded me of the necessity of humility and patience in my life. Oddly enough, a trip like this gives me the perspective to appreciate the wisdom of these twin foundations of an undivided life.

The second was a follow-up book by Dan Ariely on the nature of human irrationality. He stressed the value of testing our many irrational but cherished assumptions about life and human behavior. He also advocated apologizing, showing our appreciation for others, driving hard through bad experiences without pause, and breaking up good experiences so as not to get used to them and devalue them.

One thing he wrote caught my attention particularly. We often make decisions that repeat earlier decisions we have made, according to his research. We repeat patterns of behavior because we are creatures of habit, but also because we like to affirm things we have already done. When we make rash decisions in the heat of emotion, Ariely has found, we later repeat those rash actions without thinking - or even without the heated emotion that led to the original decision.

This pattern makes a case, Ariely writes, for thinking very carefully when we are angry or sad or carried away emotionally. And for sleeping on a decision we feel the need to make in the sway of these emotions. The decisions we make now set in motion a pattern for the future. We can escape this pattern only by the kind of deep introspection that we typically avoid in our daily life. Patience pays off rich dividends. So say Ariely and the desert fathers.

Another of Ariely's gems involved advice to anyone looking for love. He has little positive to say about dating sites, which cater to the needs of databases, rather than people, and which only confirm our bias for the appearance of beauty. Instead of comparing our statistics, Ariely counsels, we would be far better off engaging in virtual dates, sharing our thoughts and stories and learning about each other - as far as the online dating scene goes.

This counsel seems obvious enough. But it was the canoe metaphor that caught my attention. Ariely wrote that paddling together in a canoe places a couple in a strange and challenging social situation that enables each of them to witness how their potential partner behaves when faced with a challenge - and especially how they treat someone in a relationship when challenged. Very good advice. If they can't find a canoe, any atypical social endeavor would probably do.

The third book, Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," examined relationships from an entirely different point of view. In a vicious story, the love of a woman proves fierce and undying. Meeting such a woman results from grace, not planning. The love the results from such an encounter demands only gratitude and appreciation; it refuses to judge but remains true.