Gone is the horror and the majesty. Gone are the four Horsemen and two great beasts. Gone, too, are the Woman and the Son, and the Tower and the Wicked one. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the end of the world as we know it The Road, all that is left is its detritus: shopping carts and plastic tarps, ancient beans, burnt out structures, stolen shoes. The mummified carcass of a world that was long on its way out. In any other age it would all be heresy, radiant nihilism. But in the post-modern, post-millennial, godless, mortgaged realm we reside in, McCarthy’s bleak tenor is resonant.
“No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. [54]”
