The Road – by Cormac McCarthy
I like this book a lot. It’s a short read, and I just finished the re-read. After the first pass I wasn’t entirely convinced, but the second sealed the deal for me. Lol, I even cried a little. Little House makes me cry too …so shut up!
His style took a bit to get used to, but it was so strong that I started to internalize my own dialogue in much the same way! Short sentences that at times seemed somewhat grammatically obtuse. I’m no English Major, but I can’t see how his book would escape a stream of red from any English teacher. “The nights dead still and deader black.” 273. “The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.” 96. “Something with rubber tires by the narrow treadmarks.” 103. The phrasing almost catches you off-guard, and you need to force yourself to consider the word before the sentence. This was the problem on my first read, I kinda ‘bulled’ through and missed the details in many places. But it became addictive, and made you consider images and feelings without him having to spell things out for you. The ‘message’ was interesting as well, but I’ll first give you a whack of passages that caught my attention.
“All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.” 74
“In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might off themselves but never the one to be.” 27
“…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.” 130
“At a cross roads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.” 261
“Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.” 187
“The old man shook his head. I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men can’t live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true. Things will be better when everybody’s gone.” 172
“When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was.” 48
“Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.” 114
“He 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 its referents and so of its reality. In time to wink out forever.” 88
“He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget somethings, don’t you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” 12
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no 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. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.” 54
“He woke in the darkness, coughing softly. He lay listening. The boy sat by the fire wrapped in a blanket watching him. Drip of water. A fading light. Old dreams encroached upon the waking world. The dripping was in the cave. The light was the candle which the boy bore in a ringstick of beaten copper. The wax sputtered on the stones. Tracks of unknown creatures in the mortified loess. In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.” 280
“He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it.” 154
I wasn’t sure exactly what to take away from this book. It’s a great story. It’s a great journey. It’s remarkably uplifting but at the same time starkly depressing. It makes you think and it makes you feel at the same time. Part of me admires the values of the man and the boy, and part of me wants to consider that there is something that guides us through life …to believe in things like ‘fires’, ‘good guys’ and ‘luck’. McCarthy, I feel, does a good job of partially leaving those decisions up to the reader …yet not completely. The scene with the old man on the road (160-170’s) was a little forced for me. Unnatural. I also got a little tired of the ‘good guys – bad guys’ routine. But like I said, I do think he left the window open for interpretation.
The child’s perspective sans normal civilization was enlightening. Always wanting to help. Always seeing the best in what the man feared was the worst. But that child grew eventually. Changed. The man makes the comment one day when looking at the child “…he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again.” 136. And that’s the crux of it all I think. You might consider it a move from what is right …or you might simply consider it as a move. We all change. To assume that what we change from is somehow better than what we change into is a matter of perspective.
That’s my ‘wiggle’ room at least.
