In the Dark, With the Light

“When he woke in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out and touch the child sleeping behind him.”  The hypnotic rhythm of The Road begins from its very first line – a line that I didn’t even need to refer to when I wrote it out, as I have been humming it all week.  While I fathomed the existential depths of the novel for a second time this week, its myriad potential meanings sprawled out before me.  I was left chilled, grateful, impassioned and desperate, for McCarthy cuts to the heart of our world and casts a spell of silence that takes the air out of even the firmest voice.  If the Book of Revelation is Apocalypse Bound, then The Road is the Apocalypse Unbound, fully realized and explored: our world given over utterly to the void.

It is hard to know from whence to approach this epic story – I’ve been walking around telling anyone who will listen that it is ‘the bleakest novel of our age’, and desperately urging him or her to read it.  The terseness of McCarthy’s prose, the archetypal elements that populate his landscape, the dire warnings to modernity implicitly issued throughout our heroes’ journey; all are worthy of dissertation and dissection.  But let me focus, for a moment, on that theme that sounds across the greatest gulches and deepest caves that even death cannot destroy: Love.  Here, it is the very fabric of the story, tying together the warp and weft from that first line to the very last.  McCarthy wrote a novel about the ultimate planetary death, and against it he pitted the grubby, desperate love of a father for his son and son for his father.  The courage of this love knows no limits – it goes beyond survival, and does not require hope.  Though in this apocalypse God the father is absent, love is said by some to be the manifestation of some such cosmic unity.  It is the force that holds us together in the face of indefatigable death.

Though our society has walked so far down the path of self-annihilation, to the point that it inverted and we became our own suicidal avatars, humanity has not lost its incredible power to love.  We are the son leaving his father’s corpse, and McCarthy makes it clear that only by letting go of our attachment can we speak to and from the heart.  He still carries the flame that they shared.  When we no longer try to possess and control the other (person, property, technology, nature), we recognize life and love as eternally intertwined, and form a united front against world-destruction.  This world is still full to the bursting with life, and no conflict could be worth replacing so much love with death.  “Once,” McCarthy writes at the book’s close, “there were brook trout in the streams of the mountains… They smelled like moss in your hand.” The Road is about what is gone, and, conversely, it is about just how much we are blessed to have.