The strange thing about this story is that although
the world is ending and there really is nothing left to hope for, the main
protagonist, the unnamed man, stubbornly, almost defiantly, keeps on protecting
his son, pushing him forward to a non-existing future. His actions betray a
hope that persists against all hope, a hope that cannot be extinguished, not
even by the greatest despair. And desperate he certainly is, cursing the God
that has let this happen. “He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there?
he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you?
Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh
God.” But God doesn’t answer. He, too, has left, has abandoned his creation. Or
perhaps he has never been there in the first place. Perhaps it has always been
an illusion, the crazy idea that the universe has eyes and ears to see and
listen to our pain and sorrows and, somewhere, somehow, a compassionate heart
to feel for us and with us. Perhaps the world has revealed its true nature at
last.
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and 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 groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and
borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”The revealed emptiness is almost unbearable. “There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.” So why carry on? Why not die with the rest of the world? Maybe because there is still some beauty left, which appears even more precious, far more precious, when it is in danger of vanishing forever, when it has become the rarest thing imaginable. Beauty in the human heart that loves, and beauty in the human form that is being loved.
“No list of things to be done. The day providential
itself. The hour. There is no later. This is 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.”
“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep
that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure
what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things
that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”
The man tells the boy that they are the good guys
and that they “carry the fire”. It seems important to the boy. What fire? The
fire of humanity. The fire of what is, or ever was, good and true and beautiful
in the world. This fire is also the breath of God. There is even a suggestion, on
the very last page of the book, that the fire will always be there. Before his
father dies he tells the boy that even when he will be dead the boy could still
talk to him. But the woman who then finds him tells him about God, so he tries
to “talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to
him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the
breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”
However, the very last paragraph once again
emphasises the impossibility to turn things around, to repair what cannot be
repaired. That once things are lost, things that ought to be precious to us,
they cannot be retrieved. Once they are lost, they are lost forever. And we are
reminded of the beauty of this world and how important it is to take good care
of it, so that it does not go away and leaves us behind in an empty world. We,
not God, are this beauty’s guardians.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the
mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where white edges
of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.
Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns
that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which
could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they
lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
It is good to have authors like Cormac McCarthy because even though they aren't right about the world they shake things up.
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