The end of the world as we know it.

This is something of a rambling thread, so please bear with me.

Yesterday I read Cormac McCarthy's [/i]The Road. It's a quick read--it only took a few hours. It's a book that I have both wanted to read, and dreaded reading. McCarthy can be unrelentingly bleak, even as his prose style can be so beautiful. So if you've read All The Pretty Horses or Blood Meridian[i], then just picture that kind of story, except it's set in America after some kind of apocalyptic event that never quite gets defined. We don't know if it was triggered by humans, or some kind of volcanic eruption (there's endless ash everywhere)--maybe a gigantic meteor. As he does in all his fiction, McCarthy resists easy generic categories--apocalypse movies and booksare all about the "money shot", big earthquakes, cataclysmic events, etc. This novel is set after that. A father and son are walking down the road toward the ocean. They try to scavenge, survive, and escape marauding bands of cannibals (whose presence is sparing and all the more horrifying for its understatedness). That's it. It's a horrifying vision. And sad.

I am surprised by how much I liked this book, and how much it got me thinking about religion and civility in general. At one point, the father says something like "there are no more godspoke men on the road." At another point, a half-crazy old man says "There is no God and we are his prophets." At the same time, the father invokes God throughout the novel--his commitment is to save his son if he can, while realizing there may be nothing to save him for. And yet the pair are always "lucky": consistently receiving chance gifts that help thm to survive.

It has gotten me thinking, first of all, about stuff. Surprisingly, it has not made me want to jettison things that I now realize are unimportant. Rather, it has given me a sort of tender regard for all of the things that we use to create civilization. I woke up feeling this intense gratitude for electrivity and refrigerators, and antibiotics. And paper. It also brought to mind the book of Genesis.

I was thinking of the story of Cain and Abel, imagining Adam and Eve alone in this desolate, "roadlike." non-Edenic landscape, scratching their living from the land, bearing children in pain. And then I suddenly had an insight into that first story of fratricide--how utterly fallen we are, how the family is the first and last place where we choose love or hate. Again, this made me think of the fragility of human civilizations, all the tiny threads it rests on. Which made me think of the name of this forum, actually, and post I read below about what happened ysterday on the Syracuse forum. I think Austenfan is right when she says that the wingnuts who say they'd like to run over Christians are serious at the core. There's a scene in the book where the man and his son come across a library that was torn apart in what seems like rage--that's what I picture when I read posts over there, a kind of gleeful barbarianism at the gate of civility.

Fonally, I also struck by a line in the book where he tells the son to be careful of the pictures he puts in his mind, to look away. As the images towards the end of the book become increasingly horrific (ending with a most gruesome one of a murdered and cannibalized infant) I thought about what he might be suggesting about his very own book. The son finally refuses to look away from anything, and I wondered if McCarthy's book might be more of an allegory than it initially lets on. I also wondered about the wisdom of filling my head with images from McCarthy's book, at the same time--it's a rather bleak world. Is it helpful to imagine such a place--do we already live in such a landscape, in a sense?

but your discussion of the novel reminded me of Lear, and your comment about how this didn't make you want to reject the superfluous but rather embrace it reminded me of the first speech below in particular:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious.

Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer
with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.
Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou
owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep
no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on
's are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself:
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare,
forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!
come unbutton here.

It seems to me like Shakespeare gets that it is in superfluity that we are more than beasts, and that to strip ourselves down to bare nexessity is to become "the thing itself," a mere beast, a "poor bare forked animal."

And that's a great comparison, because I kept thinking of the ubi sunt poems. The vision in the novel is precisely the vision at the end of Lear--there's nothing left, there's nothing to rebuild, it's over. I remember one of our professors talking, once, about Beowulf as an apocalyptic poem, and that "the end of the world" has happened before to various groups of people. Now that I think about it, I wonder if McCarthy had that in mind--at the end, he says to the son whom he has promised to kill, if it comes down to it, that he can't: he says "I can't hold my dead son in my arms."

And I'd never thought of those lines from Lear in precisely this context--I've always been caught up in Lear's inability to see the poor he has failed until he's stripped down to nothing. But it is the superfluous that makes us human, our ability to design cultures, however flawed they may be. What's chilling ultimately about the novel is not the blasted landscape or the freakish images, but the utter and total lack of community. There are no other "good guys" (the father's words) for them to join up with, they're very much like the speaker in the Wanderer on the beach--no meadhall, no people, no nothin'.