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The main point I want to deal with is how I managed to walk away from this book with a trenchant sense of gratitude at the forefront of my mind. I certainly won’t mislead and paint this story as one that directly radiates things to be happy about, but I do think it does so indirectly (and the term "happy" is far too facile for my purposes here).

This is an extremely dark tale of a world passed through a proverbial dissolvent. A world stripped of its major ecological systems. Small pockets of homo sapiens remain and virtually all other animal and vegetative life has vanished. For the Father and the Boy—the core characters of the novel who are holding onto to their existence by the most tenuous of threads—for them nearly every moment consists of terror and misery. Food is extremely scarce. Fellow humans are often very likely to kill and eat them. There’s an utter lack of good prospects on the horizon. And when terror seems less immediate and they have a moment to become lost in the luxuries of long-term memory, the thoughts tend to be ones of painful regret and helplessness and are just as bleak as the immediate surroundings and circumstances. A REALLY, REALLY SAD AND SCARY TALE. Okay.

It’s fitting—albeit in a superficial, mundane coincidence type of fashion—that I’m reading The Road for the first time as soon as the temperatures in my cartographic slice of things have just plummeted to single-digit degrees. The slow death of autumn has given way to the inescapable, temporary halt of much organic hustle and bustle. The skies often tend to merge with the washed out grays and whites of the landscape. As almost goes without saying, the world of McCarthy’s unexplained apocalypse is one in which each day is more gray than the last. So there seems to be some veneer of kinship between this world and my current surroundings, but what’s more important—far, far more important—are the manifold differences. Compared to the bleak world of the book that sits to my left, the nonfictional winter of the Chicago tri-state area is a veritable paradise. Colors are still abundant, if you choose to notice them. The buildings, cars and clothes we encase ourselves in—in sum—still display a wide range of colors, patterns, novelties, and so on, which to an eye accustomed to and expectant of tattered gray wastelands would appear as an orgiastic celebration of beauty and eyesight like none other. Though sunlight is less abundant now than in other seasons we are still, often enough, visited by a warmth and illumination that comes from that distant, worship-worthy star above, as opposed to a random explosion from some chunk of flammable infrastructure releasing its dying breath, or from a meager fire knelt over and struggled to bring to life.

In full disclosure, I can’t say that anyone has ever accused me of being an optimist. I’ve held the deed to boatloads—jam-packed harbors of them—of cynicism, despair, and all the other synonyms for negative emotional states and psychological dispositions. But I also feel that the struggle against nihilism, apathetic numbness, and ascetic ideology of all stripes is The Great Foundational Struggle for myself, and for my fellow strange hairless primates to take up and take up with vigor. To be able to look uncertainty, intuitive pessimism, our own impending demise, and even the gaping void of eternity squarely in its facelessness and still wrest away something profoundly good and meaningful.

I’ve also been no stranger to the wishful-yearning to abandon my human cognitive faculties, our apparently unique ability to look forward, to anticipate, to construct possibilities, outcomes, goals, to direct wonder and desire at and upon the world around and within us, and to reflect upon these very things and the reflection itself, the reflection itself, the reflection itself... These useful evolutionary adaptations (and their attendant byproducts) often feel like a burden to those who also have the aforementioned boatloads somehow connected to their person. The burden is simply in the fact that where one can see ahead they can see ahead to miserable outcomes.

I used to mentally nod in agreement when Craig Schwartz, in Being John Malkovich, remarks to his wife’s pet chimpanzee that "Consciousness is a curse." I used to quasi-proudly cite the Samuel Johnson quote at the beginning of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas that "He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." And one dramatic evening the man singing the song [which has been removed from the top of the review now] literally slapped me and metaphorically awoke me from this nihilistic slumber by pointing to the words "pain of being man" which were scrawled, in my hand, upon a miniature American flag and screamed something to the effect of "This is something you can't ever fully get rid of!" What is basically an obvious truth hit me like a ton of bricks, the way that certain obvious yet somehow elusive truths are want to do. It was a moment that, say, Nietzsche would’ve been proud of, as he was brilliant at and adamant in his fight against nihilism and opposed to treating pain as something merely to be avoided rather than faced and even, in some ways, embraced.

In sum, wishing away our nature, our circumstance, our humanity—this is no better and no less cowardly than blissfully strolling along as if everything’s coming up roses when the world crumbles around you. It’s a rejection of the present world--a sigh of resignation, signed, sealed, delivered. We have to learn to do something with our terror and woe. Pronouncing it terminal and sitting back to watch the world turn to cinders and dust is no longer an option, and precisely because of how dire many of our situations truly are.

There’s a tremendously powerful scene in which the Father and the Boy discover an underground bunker filled with food and various supplies. The joy and relief they feel in that bunker is the metaphorical core of where gratitude lies in terrible situations. My bunker, our bunker, is generally much more vast in the present nonfictional world of circumstances--both the circumstances that we share and the ones that are enclosed within. And yet somehow this gratitude is not really any easier to find and possess in a lasting way than the literal bunker that briefly acts as a protective womb for the central characters of this dark and harrowing tale.

This is all to say that there is something very important about finding real silver linings and that in rejecting so many false ones we may accidentally toss out the genuine ones. Genuine goodness gets caught so easily in our blind spots.

"What a wonderful thing to be alive and given to hungering."
—Death Rattle Orchestra, "The Hand's Mouth"

Books like this that contain such magnificently terrible visions of a doomed planet, also contain the impetus to appreciate things once taken for granted and to cherish and protect these things with every fibre of one’s being. They also contain a pulse of something that is purely beautiful such as the relationship between the Father and the Boy. Clearly, they represent some sort of triumph of perseverance, but not at all in the glib, mindless language of motivational posters, but in a hard-nosed, realistic manner that taps into deep and serious feelings and verifiable realities, rather than delusional slogans recited to keep general unpleasantness at bay. The story doesn’t end happily ever after, not by a long shot, but there are real triumphs all along the way and these don’t vanish simply because we aren’t served up every fulfilled desire on a silver platter. Such is life. The world is not drained of meaning simply because it is finite and partially composed of fallibility, uncertainty, and things generally that fall short of our yearned-for ideals. The triumphs are real.

He held the boy by the hand and they went along the rows of stenciled cartons. Chile, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. This richness of the vanished world. Why is this here? the boy said. Is it real?
Oh yes. It's real.

Anything that can shake a person to their core and set off a chain of thoughts that leads to the desire to live better than before, perhaps ethically, or to allow them to feel things more profoundly—such as gratitude and amazement at the very fact of anything existing at all—deserves all the praise it can get. As far as I’m concerned Cormac McCarthy’s writing is now praise-worthy in this way.