in memoriam of cormac mccarthy
one of the greats
Cormac McCarthy died last week.
The news saddened me. Just last year he cemented himself as one of my favourites. The writing game has lost one of its best. But I cant imagine he would want us to wax sentimental about it. So I wont.
He was alive and now he’s not and that’s that.
But the raw fact of the matter doesnt preclude us from honouring his memory and saying a few words about his legacy.
hi all, c.d. here: we’re about to get into deep spoilers for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Even with McCarthy’s unique style (more on that in a minute, of course), at sub-300 pages in paperback, it’s a very accessible read. This book is an all-time favourite of mine and I highly recommend it, so if you have any interest in checking this novel out for yourself, now is your chance to turn back.
We could probably use any of McCarthy’s novels as the grounding agent for this thread, so distinctive was his voice, but I believe The Road (2006) is the ideal choice. Because, even more so than his other works, The Road revolves around life and death. Quite literally: the book follows a father and son as they navigate a post-apocalyptic world, the dreadful offspring of a collapsed biosphere and the erasure of any recognizable vestige of human civilization.
It doesn’t exactly make for cheerful reading. But, while it might seem paradoxical at first: The Road is one of the most profoundly hopeful books I’ve ever read.
And I think that’s what makes it the most fitting tribute for a writer worth remembering.
imagine a world like that
Cormac McCarthy was often lauded for writing “for the ages”—that is, in a style superseding any particular temporal moment; a product, it seemed, of a deep, heroic past or some distant, utopian future. And I think there’s actually some substance to this praise, not just flowery, lyrical ass-kissing: after all, it’s why we still read Homer, Livy, Milton, and Shakespeare. Great storytelling is timeless.
Only time will tell, of course, whether McCarthy really possessed this rarest and most envied artistic gift. If he is still read and studied in succeeding centuries (if there are succeeding centuries in which to read and study him, I believe he would want me to stress), only then will we have our answer.
For what it’s worth, I believe he will be, especially upon re-reading The Road this week.
But to overemphasize his potential literary canonization risks obscuring the fact that his works were profoundly marked by the time and place in which they were produced. Sure, McCarthy grappled with eternal questions of human nature—subject matter as old as the act of story-telling itself—but he was also a white, heteronormative man who came of age in the American South during the mid-twentieth century. Those facets of his identity and perspective necssarily impacted his work.
In McCarthy’s oeuvre then, we have the synthesis of modern and ancient anxieties coexisting in delicate balance. The Road is no different; stylistically, it’s an ultra-modern novel; thematically, however, it’s a kinsman of the most ancient of tales.
That he pulls this off, in a manner that is at all intelligible, speaks to McCarthy’s exceptional talent.
Here is how The Road begins:
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold galucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in the shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
So, the narrative begins in medias reas, but in a post-modern twist on the classical technique, McCarthy never bothers to provide a comprehensive explanation of what has happened, eschewing the traditional Homeric approach of filling in gaps at later points in the story. The Road never explains itself and it never tries to. It’s content to live in the tension of the unkown.
Because it doesn’t matter whether the world ended via climate catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, or rogue asteroid impact—none of that changes the point, which is: this is all that’s left.
The leak and foreboding imagery served to us in the opening paragraph proves a constant companion throughout The Road. The novel portrays a world deprived of hope—of a future—a world drained of colour and vibrancy and joy, because it lacks any semblance of life. It is cold and dark and hostile. A world which has rendered all the wretched creatures unfortunate enough to survive—like the emaciated nightmare monster with its terrifying “alabaster bones”—“pale and naked and translucent.” The faintest rumour of a former truth. Which is probably why the human characters are known to us only as “the man” and “the boy.” With just one paragraph of grim and sparse prose, McCarthy masterfully sets the tone for the whole story.
Welcome to Hell on Earth.
Let’s have no hand-wringing about it.
And I think that approach is what gives McCarthy’s writing an almost palpable sense of masculinity. His brash style practically smacks you over the head, all the more so if you can’t parse its meaning. Which is entirely possible. He uses words which send even the most educated readers scrambling for the dictionary. His writing lacks punctuation. It plays fast and loose with syntax. It contains nary an attribution of feeling or motivation, eschewing any overt indications for which character in a dialogue is speaking, what is inner monologue, and what is a dream or flashback.
He expects you to make do with what you’ve got and figure it out.
(Not unlike the man and boy, who must deal with whatever they encounter along the road).
It’s the authorial equivalent of throwing readers into the deep end. You’ll sink, or you’ll swim, but either way, McCarthy refuses to give a damn. (This uncompromising spirit might be his greatest strength but also his greatest weakness—because I imagine that some will resonate with the overwhelming authenticity of his voice, while others will probably be repelled by those same qualities).
Famously, McCarthy laboured for years on every novel manuscript he produced. And clearly, he expected his readers to work, too. Like a stern but encouraging father, he demands we interpret and parse meaning ourselves. It’s on us to grope for understanding. His job is merely to guide us to where it might be found:
The scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. he took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. 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.
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
If The Road were a painting and not a novel, it would be rendered in nothing but grayscale and myriad shades of brown. (A significant departure from McCarthy’s typical approach—his other novels revel so much in their use of colour that, chances are, you’ll have to look up an unfamiliar shade or two while reading).
Life isn’t here right now, please leave a message after the beep.
In The Road, the world itself has become hostile; that which gave life, now offering only charred memories of what came before.
And let’s make no bones about it, it’s a point McCarthy goes out of his way to make:
Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Take my hand, he said. I dont think you should see this.
What you put in your head is there forever?
Yes.
It’s okay Papa.
It’s okay?
They’re already there.
I don’t want you to look.
They’ll still be there.
He stopped and leaned on the cart. He looked down the road and he looked at the boy. So strangely untroubled.
Why dont we just go on, the boy said.
Yes. Okay.
They were trying to get away werent they Papa?
Yes. They were.
Why didnt they leave the road?
They couldnt. Everything was on fire.They picked their way among the mummified figures. The black skin strethed upon the bones and their faces split and shrunken on their skulls. Like victims of some ghastly envacumming. passing them in silence down that silent corridor throught he drifting ash where they struggled forver in the road’s cold coagulate.
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
The Road depicts a broken, hopeless world with no palpable sense of meaning or purpose for its bedraggled denizens. It promises suffering and death. Nothing more.
The construction of the prose itself brilliantly reinforces this, too. Just looking at The Road is a sparse experience, with the novel itself mirroring the protagonists’ journey through a liminal hellscape, elucidating the narrative mostly in paltry snippets. A typical page looks as follows:
The story proceeds in fits and starts, and on only a handful of occasions does McCarthy linger in one place long enough that you don’t see a narrative break when you flip a page. So, it probably makes more sense to think of the novel as composed of loosely related vignettes, rather than a traditional story with an overarching “plot.”
The staccato rhythm of McCarthy’s robust sentences gives rise to an overwhelming feeling of vulnerability and alien mystery. We aren’t supposed to feel secure or comfortable—like the man and boy, we too must follow the callous dictates of the road, wherever it leads.
And the road leads to some nasty places, indeed.
Cannibals. Raiders. Rapists. Slavers. Pedophiles. Cold-blooded murderers and roasters of babies.
Most of the humans that the man and boy encounter throughout the story typify the lowest dregs our species has to offer. They are a repository of our most vile, repugnant, obscene, iniquitous, depraved, and execrable impulses. McCarthy’s vision is uncompromising in its degradation.
A significant exemption, in this regard, is the “old man” the father and son come across just after the midway point of the novel. At the boy’s insistence, the man allows the old man to join them at their campfire for a meal (tough to keep all of these characters straight, huh?). Their final dialogue, at five and a half pages long, is one of the lengthiest exchanges in the whole book and one of the longest unbroken narrative sections in the whole novel.
During their discussion, the old man is evasive and explains that he doesn’t want to provide details or clues that might make him identifiable later. He simply refuses to trust the man and boy, even after they’ve given him food. Knowing he won’t relent, and that they probably don’t trust him either, the old man offers to leave, but the man assures him that he doesn’t have to. So, the old man explains why he risked eating with people he didn’t and seemingly can’t trust, giving us another example of McCarthy’s phenomenal world-building:
I’ve not seen a fire in a long time, that’s all. I live like an animal. You dont want to know the things I’ve eaten. When I saw that boy I thought that I had died.
You thought he was an angel?
I didnt know what he was. I never thought to see a child again. I didn’t know what would happen.
What if I said that he’s a god?
The old man shook his head. I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true. Things will be better when everybody’s gone.
They will?
Sure they will.
Better for who?
Everybody.
Everybody.
Sure. We’ll all be better off. We’ll all breathe easier.
That’s good to know.
Yes it is. When we’re all gone at least then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: Where did everybody go? And that’s how it will be. What’s wrong with that?
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
It’s worth pausing for a moment here, and pointing something out. Because the old man said something significant when he remarked, “I never thought to see a child again.”
Several times throughout the narrative, the man and boy encounter babies, both alive and dead, as well as pregnant women. So, it isn’t the case that babies aren’t being born. That isn’t what the old man meant.
I think we’re supposed to infer from this statement that the qualities we associate with “being a child,” qualities the boy possesses—innocence, openness, purity, good-heartedness—have long since vanished. The very concept of being a child possesses little coherence in The Road. If the old man had ever come across a young human before, as we must assume he had, then it was nothing resembling “a child.”
Cue the goosehumps.
And I think this highlights one of the few things McCarthy does spell out for the reader: the utter godlessness of the world. The utter injustice of death’s dominion.
The old man’s final words remind me of Eve’s lament in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, when she futily seeks to deny what she and Adam have unleashed upon the world with the Fall, the curse of Death:
If care of our descent perplex us most,
Which must be born to certain woe, devour’d
By Death at last, and miserable it is
To be to others cause of misery,
Our own begotten, and of our Loins to bring
Into this cursed World a woeful Race
That after wretched Life must be at last
Food for so foul a Monster, in thy power
It lies, yet ere Conception to prevent
The Race unblest, to being yet unbegot.
Childless thou art, Childless remaine: So Death
Shall be deceiv’d his glut, and with us two
Be forc’d to satisfy his Rav’nous Maw.
Excerpt from Paradise Lost (1674) by John Milton, Book X, lines 979-991.
Like Eve at the height of her grief, the old man believes that life has become “wretched”—inherently— and therefore, the best thing to be desired is an end to the suffering.
Without hope, what’s the point of pushing on? the old man notes.
So, the question becomes: is he right? Would it be better to just bring it all to an end? Is there any hope? Any, at all?
He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
Now, if you’re a mere mortal like me, you’ve never encountered the word “salitter” before, which is a shame, because it’s the key to fully comprehending what McCarthy is trying to say here.
And, please, don’t take this as an attack on your vocabulary!
“Salitter” is a term so obscure, it seems to have been used exclusively by its inventor, a sixteenth-century German mystic named Jacob Boehme, that is, until it was resurrected by McCarthy. Historians Lawrence Principe and Andrew Weeks explain the term’s meaning in a 1989 paper:
The German mystic and philosopher Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) must be included among the preeminent proponents of a divine substance. In Boehme’s first book manuscript, Aurora… the shoemaker of Görlitz introduced his notion of Salitter. For Boehme, the Salitter designated the embodiment of the total force of the divinity, the compendium of all forces operating in nature and in the human psyche. The substance Salitter is a matrix of forces that are identified with sensible ‘qualities’. The latter interact by means of fundamental oppositions and affinities. Accordingly, the spirit forces operating within Salitter are discernable in many objects of speculation: in the deity, in sensory experience, in vegetable growth, and in the objects of geology, astronomy, and meteorology. Salitter animates the supersensible and the sensible; it is the common denominator of what is conscious and alive and of what appears inanimate and inert. Salitter is the embodiment of a world conceived in organic terms.
Excerpt from “Jacob Boehme’s Divine Substance Salitter: its Nature, Origin, and Relationship to Seventeenth Century Scientific Theories,” by Lawrence M. Principe and Andrew Weeks. Published in The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar, 1989), 53-61.
What incredible word selection.
Ridiculously obscure, of course, and surprisingly difficult to find a decent definition for, but a frightently perfect word.
“The salitter drying from the earth.”
So, yeah, okay… I guess things seem pretty hopeless, right?
it feels like years since its been here
The world of The Road is awful—not unimaginably so, mind you, but so awful, at least, that ordinary language literally cannot describe it. McCarthy pours every measure of his considerable literary substance into making it sound intolerable, unacceptable—beyond any human capacity to tolerate.
And yet…
The man and the boy preserve.
Although they stumble upon a few fruitful caches along the way (scenes which often provide much-needed levity, sometimes allowing for a playful moment or bit of humour), the journey is arduous, terrifying, and deadly in the extreme.
And yet…
They persist.
And after awhile, it becomes clear that the man is dying anyhow. Coughing fits seize him, which leave blood stains in their wake. He tries to hide his worsening condition from the boy but to no avail. His lungs have been slowly failing, poisoned by the very air itself.
So, why do they continue? How?
Because of love—because where there is love, hope remains. As faint as it might seem in a cold, dark world.
The man loves the boy, and that love gives him the strength he requires to abide his constant suffering. The man goes on because he sees something in his son—something ancient; a relic from a bygone epoch. He persists because, within his son, there lives a seed of goodness, that which has long since abandoned the land and, perhaps, even uprooted from his own heart, as well.
In The Road, the divine spark has gone out, save that which lives on in the boy. Nurturing and protecting that spark, that goodness—his child—becomes the sole purpose of whatever tortured life remains in the man’s brittle bones.
What a beautiful testament to the power of love.
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
At different points of the novel, the man has to assure the boy that they will not sink to the depravity of “the bad guys”—enslaving women for sex, using stragglers as a harvestable food source, and the like—a promise he makes because they’re “carrying the fire.”
McCarthy never states outright what the fire is, but I take it to represent something akin to goodness or civilization (which, in the context of The Road, is a necessary medium allowing the expression of goodness).
The boy exemplifies the potential to bring some semblance of life back into the world again.
He is hope itself.
And what wouldn’t you do, in the service of hope in a world of abject despair?
Because, as the old man noted, carrying the fire is a terrible burden.
Several times throughout the book, McCarthy alludes to an unspeakable truth the man carries. His frail body is pushed to the limits hauling their cart of possessions, but the unspeakable truth is a burden beyond any mere physical strain. It preys on him and keeps him up nights.
That truth: If anything happens to him, the boy is doomed as well; to an exquisitely terrible death, in all probability.
And so we arrive at a truth even more terrible than the ones that have come before: that, when he runs out of options, the best way to protect the boy… is to take his life.
They have a revolver with only one round between them, which the man has been saving in case he needs to do the thing he dreads most. Any time he needs to scavenge for food, he leaves the pistol with the boy, who knows what’s expected of him if things turn sour.
While hiding from raiders, the narrative briefly slips into the man’s inner monologue, and we get a visceral sense of the impossible scenario he’s found himself in:
They lay listnening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesnt fire? It has to fire. What if it doesnt fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing. Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
Thus, the maintenance of the last spark of goodness in the world—and therefore the final vestige of hope for humankind—hinges on the survival of one of the smallest, frailest creatures in a world filled with ungodly horrors. So, while the man desires little more than to see an end to his ceaseless suffering, he cannot allow himself to accept the truth of this.
He is cursed with life; forced, by love and duty and a hope against all hope, to endure.
He must persist. He must love the boy more than he hates the world and life itself.
I know it might not have sounded like it at first, but The Road is a meditation on the awesome and awful power of love.
Naturally, the man does brutal things ensuring their survival on the road. But he does them knowing that such things have become necessary, that they must be done to shelter the boy from a world of endless danger, flooded with violence and depravity, which must be endured before it can be swept clean.
I think this, too, adds an interesting element of hopefulness to the novel.
There’s almost a biblical parallel, here. The man is akin to the vengeful god of the Old Testament; a harsh judge, fiercely selective in his benevolence. The type of terrible, fearsome god who commands, “And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him;/Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again./And he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it: and he that killeth a man, he shall be put to death.” (Leviticus 25:19-21).
Throughout The Road, the boy asks the man to assist what few survivors they encounter who aren’t hostile. These are often moments of disagreement, with the man unwilling to extend his covenant to others.
Good-natured, but certainly not naïve, the boy seems driven by a desire to love as widely as possible. The man, however, has a more hardened understanding of the world. Toward the end of the novel, they leave their possessions on a beach while taking a walk. They return to find everything stolen. Soon though, they catch the thief:
They went on. It was already late in the day and it was another hour and deep into the long dusk before they overtook the thief, bent over the loaded cart, trundling down the road before them. When he looked back and saw them he tried to run with the cart but it was useless and finally he stopped and stood behind the cart holding a butcher knife. When he saw the pistol he stepped back but he didn't drop the knife.
Get away from the cart, the man said.
He looked at them. He looked at the boy. He was an outcast from one of the communes and the fingers of his right hand had been cut away. He tried to hide it behind him. A sort of fleshy spatula. The cart was piled high. He’d taken everything.
Get away from the cart and put down the knife.
He looked around. As if there might be help somewhere. Scrawny, sullen, bearded, filthy. His old plastic coat held together with tape. The pistol was a double action but the man cocked it anyway. Two loud clicks. Otherwise only their breathing in the silence of the salt moorland. They could smell him in his stinking rags. If you dont put down the knife and get away from the cart, the man said, I’m going to blow your brains out. The thief looked at the child and what he saw was very sobering to him. He laid the knife on top of the blankets and backed away and stood.
Back. More.
He stepped back again.
Papa? the boy said.
Be quiet.
He kept his eyes on the thief. Goddamn you, he said.
Papa please dont kill the man.
The thief’s eyes swung wildly. The boy was crying.
Come on, man. I done what you said. Listen to the boy.
Take your clothes off.
What?
Take them off. Every goddamned stitch.
Come on. Dont do this.
I’ll kill you where you stand.
Dont do this, man.
I wont tell you again.
All right. All right. Just take it easy.
He stripped slowly and piled his vile rags in the road.
The shoes.
Come on, man.
The shoes.
The thief looked at the boy. The boy had turned away and put his hands over his ears. Okay, he said. Okay. He sat naked in the road and began to unlace the rotting pieces of leather laced to his feet. Then he stood up, holding them in one hand.
Put them in the cart.
He stepped forward and placed the shoes on top of the blankets and stepped back. Standing there raw and naked, filthy, starving. Covering himself with his hand. He was already shivering.
Put the clothes in.
He bent and scooped up the rags in his arms and piled them on top of the shoes. He stood there holding himself. Dont do this, man.
You didnt mind doing it to us.
I’m begging you.
Papa, the boy said.
Come on. Listen to the kid.
You tried to kill us.
I’m starving, man. you’d have done the same.
You took everything.
Come on, man. I’ll die.
I’m going to leave you the way you left us.
Come on. I’m begging you.
He pulled the cart back and swung it around and put the pistol on top and looked at the boy. Let’s go, he said. And they set out along the road south with the boy crying and looking back at the nude and slatlike creature standing there in the road shivering and hugging himself. Oh Papa, he sobbed.
Stop it.
I can’t stop it.
What do you think would have happened to us if we hadn’t caught him? Just stop it.
I’m trying.
Excerpt from The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
Let me just quickly say: what a masterclass in tension building.
In my symbolic reading then, the boy represents Jesus, the fulfillment of prophecy, and the ultimate victory of life and love over death and hatred. The boy, unlike the man, represents the hope for a better, more humane future—the birth of a respectable god. He is the possibility of a better world to come.
Only a few pages after the incident with the thief, the man’s terminal lung condition reaches the point of no return, “…and when he lay down he knew that he could go no further and that this was the place where he would die. The boy sat watching him, his eyes welling. Oh Papa, he said.”
It’s not a tragic ending though. The man had successfully protected the boy, his God—perhaps the last god—from impossible perils. He had given hope the chance it needed.
When he dies, the man leaves the world with more hope than he had ever thought possible (at least in that, fallen world).
The narrative ends with the boy partnering up with another man, one of the elusive “good guys” his father had assured him remained hidden. Waiting. Hoping.
The man is accompanied by a woman, who lovingly embraces the boy. And in the hands of this nameless Adam and Eve, we see the spark of hope kindle into a tiny flame.
She said that the breath of God was his breath yet htough it pass form man to man through all time.
It’s an ending that reinforces the power of love and its ability to conquer any conceivable obstacle.
With the passing of the man, the boy takes the painful, but necessary, step of succeeding, and hopefully exceeding, his father.
Early in the novel, the man reflects on his charge and the challenge before him: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”
The difference between “the never to be” and the “never was,” I believe, is potential.
The “never to be” is an impossibility—an irreconcilable gulf between desire and reality. A fantasy.
The “never was,” however, is simply that which has yet to arise.
“Yet” being the keyword, there. The “never was” has the potential “to be.” That’s how it differs from the never to be.
The boy, then, is the potential for goodness—the very embodiment of hope.
For nearly three hundred pages, Cormac McCarthy had ushered us—characters and readers alike—through the bowels of hell itself. And yet, he chose to end The Road with message of hope, of promise—of potential—for something better.
He was exacting, pain-staking, uncompromising. He lived in poverty for decades, unwilling to abandon his craft or compromise his vision. I, for one, am grateful for his extreme dedication. He was a true artist and unique visionary. An unparalleled literary titan of our times.
In a career spanning 1965 to 2022, he released only twelve novels. Exceptional works, all.
Unlike the man in The Road, however, I’m not sure that McCarthy leaves a world with more hope than was there when he entered it. And yet, when compared to The Road, we live in a world practically ablaze with the potential for hope and love. We should take heart.
And if we should ever find ourselves shrinking from the cold, dark of the world, McCarthy will be there to remind us that love can always see us through.
Keep carrying the fire.
After reading this I feel compelled to watch the Movie. Consider it rented and on the docket for tomorrows viewing.