The Road

Some experiences are best lived once. I feel that way about The Road by Cormac McCarthy. 

After reading an article about films best seen once, I felt compelled to confess that I have never seen the film version of The Road, nor will I. Once with that story is enough.

That book broke me. It broke me as a father, as a man. It broke me in ways I cannot articulate. So much so that I warn my friends NOT to read it. The story is that good.

The pain The Road inflicted on me became physical. I couldn’t sleep. It twisted my gut. Afterwards, I felt like I had lost something. My soul felt wounded.

The Road affected me so much because I could not deny its truth.

Let me qualify the previous statement: plenty of ideas in the story don’t hold up to scrutiny. The most egregious being the notion that after a great calamity, the only surviving organism on earth could be humankind. No plants. No rats. No life other than people. Not even beetles to recycle human remains.

Rather, it was the truth of the human condition that was so unassailable in the narrative. The Road made me look squarely at it. Every line of the story was a syllogism, leading to the inescapable conclusion. There are two types of people: those who would kill you and eat you if their life depended on it and those who would rather die.

Let the crisis unfold long enough and there will only be one type of person left.

I began looking at my friends, the customers in the grocery store differently. By the time I had finished The Road, I had quietly observed the people in my life and felt like I could discern who was whom.

It still hurts.

The post The Road appeared first on The Old Man.