The Road (2006)

I'm gathering some of my resources together for this book - and I found I had nothing! It all must have been lost when AUGUSTUS died.

So Reb - would you have any copies of anything on it? Especially the essays we wrote.

It's fitting that I've lost 95% of the material I had on The Road because losing everything is what this story is about - losing everything yet finding ways to continue on. So I'll begin with what I remember.

Cormac McCarthy (or CM as we'll call him) is a Great American Writer. Born in 1933 in Tennnsess to the large Irish Catholic family of a prominent lawyer.  He made his mark by mixing snooty upper-class writing (i.e big words, strange punctuation, focus on dialogue, details and emotions) with dirty ultra-violence. The books were written in the 60s and 70s, set in the American South and always had some rotten core at the center: a decomposing body, a child being killed, a serial killer.  It wasn't until the 1980s that the cultural tastes aligned with CM's and he had his break-through best-seller, Blood Meredian (1985). This was a unrelentingly violent Western spiced with mysticism. Since then he has been a Great American Writer.

In 2003, at the ripe age of 70, CM found himself in the midst of his third divorce while raising his third son who was only 5 years old. Taking his son on a trip through a post-911 Texas, CM wondered what this trip would be like during the Apocalypse. How would an old man and a child fare when society collapsed? It is no accident that CM wrote No Country for Old Men during this same period.

Why read The Road? I cannot say I'm a fan of CM, and I've only read one other work by him. I have many reservations about the messages in The Road.  Despite this I think The Road is a book you can wrestle with. It is a muscular book - the writing is lean, the landscapes are wastelands, the philosophies are searing - you can press your intellectual shoulder against it and it pushes back. I don't trust The Road and it respects that.  There is also a strain of black humor and raw emotion that is so pathetic that is almost endearing. Maybe even some dark wisdom to it. It is like a 'level boss' to me, if I can understand it I can pass beyond it.


So I'm going to do another pilgrimage on The Road. Every Thursday and Sunday for the next month I will post something on this book.

It is a particularly American level boss, it uses nihilism, violence, sentimentality and mysticism in equally measure, it is old, cunning and leans rightwards. So if you are joining along for this expedition, get ready for a dark journey through the planet's final days.

Practical Notes

The Road has no chapter breaks (and barely any punctuation) so it makes it hard to reference specific passages. Often it is easier just to cut'n'paste any text you want to discuss.

The overall story is a road trip that makes for a quick read but there are arty/philosophical paragraphs right in the mix. Skip those on your first reading but dissect some of them afterwards, they are often pretty short. The Road's very first paragraph is one of those dense bits, it is a dream sequence designed to scare off lightweight readers - or at least put them on notice that this book has literary pretensions (spoiler: the very last paragraph is one of those bits too). Tackling those sections is part of the fun to me.

Keep a dictionary handy. CM likes archaic words, sometimes old cowboy terms, sometimes mystical stuff.

CM wrote a play called The Sunset Limited at the same time as The Road. The play is a simple two man show where a black ex-con tries to convince a white professor not to commit suicide. I believe this play contains the core philosophical argument in The Road and presents them in much clearer manner. I strongly recommend this as a supplementary reading.

So, I've made it through 24 pages in my first reading, and read most of the paper about mapping and southern-geocentristic themes in post-modern american literature the next day.

I have a few observations, lots of thoughts, and not much time or practice in expressing them, but here goes:

1) Theme of darkness or beyond darkness, into nothingness stands out front and center to me. It's not just that it's night, but that it's starless night. It's not that it is just one starless night, but that it is always a starless night. It's not just that it's proprioceptially dementingly dark, it's that if there would be light, only ashes and decay would be seen. At least the things of ash and the stars are still there, behind the filth, but so much of the meaning attached to those things; society, technology, knowledge, achievement, culture have fallen into the darkness so clearly and quickly. The actions of the man and his son, all comment on things of permanence, at least in these two humans, and speak to what may be worth preserving.

“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing
takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That
ever is no time at all.”

― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Yeah - the novel is very much blacker than black (vantablack?). This separate it from the glut of other apocalyptic media (mostly zombie) of this era. The collapse of civilization is a sociological question, the end of all life on Earth is a mystical/philosophical question. Finding meaning and a way to continue forward as Earth cools toward absolute death to join the planets around it in silent lifelessness is existential bedrock.

We didn't get power back on until Saturday morning. I woke up at 4am that morning because of a sore back and my eyes were surprisingly adapted to the dark. So I got up and I looked out the window and saw a single porch light on across the bay. My heart leapt at the sight.

I was exhilarated but not because this meant we had power too. If only we had power back, the darkness would have still been all-surrounding and encompassing, but seeing the darkness being lacerated by the light of another house meant that darkness's global dominion was over. Sometimes trips into the darkness remind how precious light is.

I went looking for Lustmord's Black Star and found this mix that began with that song.



Or go to Russia's answer to youtube and you can hear the song by itself

https://rutube.ru/video/1a77224867f72e79a1d1949e87d176dc/

To test if the music is working properly read Byron's 1816 poem 'Darkness' while listening to it, if the outside world starts to dim it and a feeling of dark luminosity begins to grow then its working. This is a "last man alive" poem based on real ecological ash-spewing written in the wake of a divorce and its full of religious imagery. I consider Byron's poem to The Road condensed to two dozen sentences. Byron wrote it right after his divorce and he was inspired by the explosion of the  Tambora volcano (1815) that plunged Europe into an infamously ash-choked sunless season of 'the summer without Sun".

Some passages of the Road seem lifted right from this poem. Here is the opening stanza:


Or if Byron is too Romantic try this passage from a chemistry book I've been reading:

Periodic Kingdom (1995) wrote:Imagine 10¹⁰⁰ years into the future. Gradually all the peaks and dales of the periodic kingdom have eroded away, only Mount Iron rises higher and higher as element collapse into its lazy, low-energy form. Eventually iron is a lonely protuberance in a sea of non-being. But even iron will decay into radiation, and that lone pinnacle will sink beneath the waves. Conceivably we might record humanity's achievements by embedded this information in that radiation but it is also conceivable that as the universe continues to expand that the radiation will be stretched out into flatness, leaving no imprint. Now the universe will be no more than dead, flat spacetime. Now the final vestiges of the kingdom are truly below the waves. All that once as, including the memory of what once was, will have vanished.

Beyond even the death-throes of our Sun or the collision of our galaxy with Andromeda, this is a true vision of the end. The universe turns to iron(!), decays to radiations and stretches out until absolute uniformity.  Pure speculation but it caught my attention when I read it.

The social collapse of most zombie apocalypse is mild and often just an excuse for preaching social darwinism. Babies roasting on spits is unpleasant but nature has made the young and old tempting targets since the PreCambrian. Serious ecological collapse is a little more serious, total planetary extinction, like The Road gets my attention, but the planet has been through a few already.

The destruction of the planet, Earth literally torn apart or burnt to its iron core, is hard-core. The destruction of our solar system or galaxy gets those strange feelings going. But "dead, flat spacetime" is truly a grim thing to ponder (unless we get into plural "dead, flat spacetime"s, or the destruction of whatever is outside 'spacetime', ect...).

The quote from the chemistry book is pretty awesome. I remember as a teenager thinking about what would happen is all life on earth died. I would imagine the solar system kinda of silently humming in motion with geological processes still occurring and it would make feel weird. Like an emptiness but it still felt like there was something on the outside of that feeling. Then I thought what if all life in the universe dies. The feeling that gave me blew my mind. It was a very intense feeling that I am struggling to find words for. The chemistry quote does capture some of that...It also captures a chunk of the Road as well.

On a lighter note -  Cormac Mccarthy looks like Peter Dinklage