"He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an 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."
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the 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."
-Cormac McCarthy THE ROAD
We've all seen or heard fiction about the end of the world. The Apocalypse. THE ROAD explores (might I say in a frightening illustration of a living, ashen hell) those deep, twisted crevices of the human heart that most people don't acknowledge until their impending end: This was a long time coming. Will the world be better off without us? Will we be better off without ourselves? Is there a God? (most people ponder this one by the age of 5) But more importantly: Is he dead? Or dying? What will that look/feel like? Does the instinct to survive--much like the instinct of any worldly creature--overcome the immorality of rape, murder, incest or cannibalism? And if it does, is there a point to surviving?
We live to love and learn; to create and ponder. But could our innocent curiosity bring on something cataclysmic? Has it already? Can you imagine a world--barely definable as one--where the only things left living are anonymous walking dead such as yourself, scurrying like roaches through the waste of a barren planet for sustainable means only to discover at some point you must choose between dying and murdering / eating another human being?
The irony is that the same scientific knowledge of our creation is that which will inevitably cause our destruction. It started with the stars in the heavens and will end much like a star; much like the splitting of atoms to create energy or dividing of cells to create new, intelligent organisms. Consciousness is a dichotomy of the human experience. We know. We love. Therefore we shall destroy. We presume to know how the brook trout got there, but only a miracle could bring it back if we destroyed it.
The world in which McCarthy's "Man" and "Boy" travel is a world absent of very much drinkable water; of brook trout; of predators to fish the trout; of the sun and the stars. But it IS chock full of absolute truths pertaining to humanity. Perhaps even more so of uncertainties about the bigger picture, and despite a mighty paternal love within, the native goodness of mankind. This world I like to think, might be an inevitability, but a world that may call back to those pre-apocalyptic times in the most earnest and desperate of voices and cry, "Appreciate it while you can."
