Carry The Fire: Contemplating The Road

I.

There I was, reading my magazine in bed. My wife next to me finishing up Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Both of us tired from a weekend getaway.

Sniffle.

My wife always keeps a tissue close by. Allergies.

Sniffle. Sniffle.

I wonder if I should get her another tissue. Still reading my magazine. Haven't looked up.

Stuttered intake of breath. Sniffle.

At this point, I look over. I am not prepared for what I see.

She's a wreck.

I've seen my wife cry before. I've seen her fall apart before. I'm always amazed by this because she's such a together person--- strong like an Amazon. But when she falls apart it's all I can do to keep myself from joining her.

I jump up. Run to the bathroom. Unravel a handful of toilet paper.

Hand it to her.

It's the book, of course. The Road did this to her.

It's no surprise that she didn't sleep well that night. I fell asleep next to her with a ghoulish anticipation.

Any book that can do that to a person, I've got to read.

II.

Last week was a trying one.

My wife lost a dear friend to cancer.

She's also been organizing a major event for her workplace and hasn't had much time to slow down, process, rest. I've been the vigilant husband with not much to do.

The summer has so far been good to me. In between work and a feeble attempt to get back in shape, I've been catching bits of The Road. Yesterday, I had an uninterrupted pass at the final pages.

At first, I sat outside. Smoking a cigar. The sparse but brilliant imagery of a post-apocalyptic journey, the best worst-case scenario I've ever encountered, walked ever closer to a conclusion that should not have been a surprise.

I thought that. When is it going to happen? Where did it get my wife? Will it get me?

There was a tenseness in my posture. Due in part to the heat and the plastic outdoor chair. But it was coming. Quickly.

I finished the cigar. Went inside. Would I have time to finish before my wife got home? Would she catch me? In between chasing a fly, the cats circled and wondered what was wrong.

Then it happened.

Sniffle. Oh god.

For all it's pace and predictability, the ending opened up the world and I slipped in.

Two tissues later. Head in hands. Eyes red. I heard the lock turn on the door downstairs. Open and close. I went to the landing.

Oh god, what's wrong?

I just finished the book.

III.

Above, I mentioned a ghoulish anticipation. Both of these brief accounts of finishing The Road don't exactly speak volumes of joy, ice cream and puppy dogs. Why the hell would anyone want to read a book that so deeply moved-- and not necessarily in the way that many are so often moved? Why would anyone voluntarily take such a trip?

This is not a book of hope. Well, not in a traditional sense. I'll come back to that.

And, having suffered the loss of my father two years ago, it might seem like down-right idiocy to long to read this book of a father and son on the edge of the end of the world.

My wife was-- understandably so-- very hesitant to hand over the book!

But there's something in that kind of-- for lack of a better word-- visceral experience that I appreciate. I discussed this in my thoughts about The Sopranos finale. It can also be found in my current obsession with the new Battlestar Galactica. My wife and my dear friend, Gerald, will back me up on all of this: In a world so completely full of itself, it's comforting and indemnifying to watch, read, and/or listen to something that has humility, frailty, humanity.

Popcorn only teases the stomach. I need real food.

And so, I burned through Gatsby's Girl and turned to The Road.

I was not disappointed.

IV.

Faith, hope, and love.

On some level, this book is a rumination on the intricacies that connect this oft used combination of words quoted from Corinthians.

See, a few weekends ago my wife and I went to a wedding where this verse was intoned. Last week, I went to a funeral service where the same verse was solemnly quoted. The connections, the parallels, the cycle of things, are not lost on me.

But I am contemplative and combative at the moment.

The phrase "the greatest of these is love" jangles. Certainly, I would not want my wife to misconstrue my meaning! But this is the crux of humanity here. In the past, my assertion has been that without love, faith and hope cannot exist. Indeed, what is faith without love? Can one hope in an apathetic state?

From this rather simplistic line of questioning, I have previously determined (for myself) that love comes first-- as "the greatest of these"-- and the others follow.

What happens, though, if I turn it around?

What good is love without faith and hope?

We might race into an argument that "love" without hope and faith leads to miscommunication: divorce, death, murder, suicide, etc.

But, circling the wagons yet again, it becomes clear that, in truth, all three are intrinsically connected, inseparable. They cannot exist without each other. In as much, might I suggest that they are one in the same?

The problem, then, rests in our definition of those words (or our separation of them; in the din of Derrida's deference).

Or, rather, our inability to spot a faker in the bunch!

V.

Carrying the fire.

I can't stop thinking about that phrase. It echoes Prometheus. It echoes the universalism of fire theft myths.

McCarthy, though, doubles, triples the meaning: Fire is what keeps humanity alive. It is the tool by which all others are forged and foraged. It is also the agent of destruction in the world of The Road.

It is the destroyer; it is the life giver.

When the man, then, proffers that he and the boy must be the carriers of the fire, he means guardian, survivor, etc. But he also references the fire within.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: To be, or not to be?

In the barren wasteland of The Road, McCarthy sings to us that "to be" is the only answer. In spite of hope. In spite of faith. Inspite of love.

We must live.

To choose not to live is the greatest sin. About this the existentialist and the devout Christian concur. To deny life is to deny the dearest thing humans have been given.

What makes The Road so powerful, though, is not some dogmatic perseverance and hope for life. There is no hope. McCarthy never lets us forget that.

And yet…

In the end, this is, in fact, a book of hope.

In the intervening time that it has taken me to finish this, I had a talk with some old friends-- one is a McCarthy fanatic. He told me that there are two schools of thought about the ending (I've not read any reviews or criticism; I choose not to poison myself). The school of the majority reads the ending as a downer. A no-hoper. This to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of the central conceit of the book.

Much like my words about The Sopranos finale, this book confounds expectations-- not simply as an exercise in "Ha, ha! I fooled you!" but as a matter of deep principle. The book's very essence (ash, wood smoke, and rosemary oil) bespeaks a theme that runs true.

Let's talk Sisyphus. The Road is a deep rumination on what Richard Taylor (in his essay "Is Life Meaningful?") points out in regards to meaning: "Meaninglessness is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite. Activity, and even long, drawn-out and repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be considered to have been the direction and purpose of the activity."

It's as if The Road takes this thought and mulls it over-- and over. The repetitious journey, the rhythm and pattern of it, exemplifies this notion of meaninglessness. It begs the reader, of course, to be expectant of a payoff. We must (as I would argue is our nature) find meaning in the novel's end. Otherwise, what have we taken the journey for? Why did we bother? Why did the man and his son bother?

Well… McCarthy gives us just enough to ponder and answer for ourselves those questions. The father dies. The boy moves on. The hope is in the memory and the teaching. There is still goodness in the world and the boy continues to carry the fire.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Well… maybe. It's hard to hold this view for long. The man dies without knowing if the boy will live or die. He has, on one level, let himself down for not having the courage to kill the boy before dying himself-- thus saving the boy any future molestation. I say on one level because I don't think the man necessarily believes he's done the wrong thing. The other simple reading is this: The entire journey is a teaching. The man can die knowing that he's given the boy the necessary skills to survive-- to continue the journey, carry the fire.

Except we know better, don't we? Yes, the boy has wonderful eyes. He can see. He can forage. He can survive against the elements. But he is not without compassion. And his compassion, the novel throughout, hampers his ability to survive. McCarthy gives us that final sequence wherein we are left thinking that the people the boy encounters are "good." But had they not been? The boy would surely not have survived his father by much.

This, I believe, must be where other readers find fault-- or at least telegraph a fouler end.

I cannot. Here's why. The line that got me the most-- that reverberated into an uncontrollable sob of understanding-- was when the boy thinks of his father instead of God. Again, the obvious parallel is that his father was/is God. Such is the way of men. Zeus overthrows the Titans. Oedipus slays his father. Theseus wears his father's sandals. These are the models of fatherhood that guide us. Though, mister postmodern is reminded of the line from Fight Club: (approximation) "Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?"

The man, then, is the boy's god. Just as is the case with our fathers.

And that's the reading. That's where the hope is. We become our fathers. Our sons become fathers. We die so they can live.

(And the colored girls go do, do, do, do do do)

Divorce the gender from the thought and humanity is born of humanity. Life and death are intrinsic. This is the only truth of existence. As such, it should be the source of our hope and comfort. We must live so that our deaths have meaning.

None of this is new, of course. But what is so beautiful about the novel is that McCarthy strips those concepts-- those models-- of their cliché-ness. He bares them new and raw for us. Huh?

I'll go back to the phrases that so often accompany death:

Why did it happen?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

It's not fair.

We have become accustomed (at arm's length) to the tropes of fate and destiny. We cast our confusion at God in hopes of an answer but accept silence in lieu of accountability. This is the easy part of dealing with death. We shed some tears, we rail at the unfairness of it, and then we get sidetracked by living again. We don't think about death until it comes close to us again. Our lives, then, are a constant paddle-ball game of coping and escaping.

The Road, however, gives us a few hundred pages to ponder.

We are confronted with the most complete rending of the earth and existence. The Road's world is completely and utterly stripped of meaning. There is no meaning, no solace here for the suffering. There is only silence, ash, and the inevitability of death.

VI.

No. Wait.

There is fire.

There is life-- however tenuous and fleeting it is. To carry the fire is to, well, to quote Dylan Thomas, "rage, rage against the dying of the light." And this is where McCarthy forces us to seriously ponder what that means. He has stripped the world of everything else.

What is left? The most elemental of all human things: A father's love for his son.

In that love there is faith. In that faith there is hope.

There ain't much of it, mind you. But goddamn it, it's there.

The father thing is particularly poignant for me. What's so sublime (deeply beautiful in its tragedy) about the final sequence is that as lofty as those notions are (God is father, etc.) they are rendered in a way that is elementally human. I was, in that moment, connected to my father-- and his death-- in a way that I had not yet been connected. There was a powerful catharsis in the sorrow McCarthy invokes.

See, my father died unexpectedly. I mean to say, my father unexpectedly got cancer. His death was expected shortly after that. I even wrote a poem about that inevitability (see previous post titled "Upon Learning of My Father's Cancer"). That poem deals in much of what I've been writing here. Read it if you like.

But the point is, that I was not prepared to deal with his death. Again, we might all say that we're ill-equipped to deal with it. For me, though, I had taught death before. I'd been through a few iterations of a mythology class wherein we discussed how underworld and apocalypse myths are ways of coping with death. In fact, as my father was dying in a hospital bed, I went into my classroom and spoke-- in the same way I had done semesters previous-- about death and coping with death.

I am partially ashamed (partially-- and this is the selfish me my wife knows well-- proud) of how I handled my emotions at this time. I approached the whole thing intellectually. And, for the most part it worked.

I was a mess during my father's funeral service. I was completely and utterly incapable of speaking at his service. When we drank wine and poured his share over his ashes in the woods behind our house, I was only slightly less affected.

But there was (and I imagine, always will be) a space between the emotions and my own sense of mortality that McCarthy's novel so eloquently spanned.

My wife sent me an article from CNN.com that summed up McCarthy's appearance on Oprah. In explaining where the novel came from, McCarthy said this: "I just had this image of these fires up on the hill ... and I thought a lot about my little boy."

The pervasiveness of that bond-- father and son-- illuminates The Road.

I thank McCarthy for giving me this last journey of father and son.

It lets me know that I can carry the fire now…