The Road (Post 3)

One sentence from Javieska’s “The Road: Post 3” really got me thinking, and I was going to comment, but since it was more of a whole new idea than a direct response to the post I decided to post instead. But Javieska gets all the credit :)

"The Road was like their life, continuing on but not really leading to a destination."

How much of the boy and man’s life really was the road? And how much of the road was defined by their life? The two certainly blurred. Their life was physically controlled by the road—they walked its curves and let it lead them to food and shelter. It gave their lives structure and pattern. Then again any road is defined by those who walk it. We build and develop “destinations” and give the asphalt direction and meaning. A thing as meaningless and superficial as a place’s reputation can give a road its destination—or is it the traveler’s destination? Was it the road that had no remaining physical destination, or was it the fact that the boy and man really had nowhere to go that made the road they took have no destination?

Its like that classic question “If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and nothing is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” If a road is no longer used or seen and its man-made destinations are gone, is it still a road? Physically—yes. Just as the tree will indeed make a sound. But neither the sound nor the road has any meaning. It could just as easily not be there and it wouldn’t make a difference. The opposite is true for the boy and man. Each hears the other’s sound, each provides a destination, a reason for the other, and, as we see at the end of the book, it does make a difference when one loses the other. If the boy had remained alone after the death if his father and everyone else on earth died, animals too, until he was the only one left, would he still want to live? Would the pleasure of eating good food or watching a sunrise be worth it if you were literally all alone? An animal with no awareness, that forms no relationships, just eats, sleeps, and reproduces, doesn’t kill itself, but what is the point of it living? I guess for the boy it would be just the hope that maybe there was someone else alive, someone to love and love him. Even if there wasn’t, the boy could keep hoping and searching. Some people say that’s the meaning of life in general. Post-apocalyptic or not. But that’s not true because plenty of people find gratification in a job or art form. So would that be true as well in the boy’s world? If he was an artist would he be content making art that only he would ever see? Or would the end of life truly narrow the happiness options?

Cormac McCarthy has got my head all befuddled with paradoxes. But what about his writing prompts this sort of thought? His hasn’t created a brand-new scenario or anything. People have been obsessed with this sort of set-up for ages. I think the simplicity and right-or-wrong writing is what gives the reader room to think. Humans like to complicate things: to have survived in the wilderness before technology we had to be suspicious,ß and now we use all our pent-up suspiciousness to form conspiracy theories and over-interpret books. So McCarthy gave us the perfect playing field. A book with a transparent moral about the power of love, very little variety or color, and an obvious division between good and bad. So my brain has reacted by trying to turn the simplicity into cheesy meditative thought.