I know confirmation bias is part of the explanation, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel weird about the good fit between books we read and the circumstances in which we read them.
I’ve recently returned from a trip to the wilds of North Texas to house- and pet-sit for my mother-in-law. She and her husband live in a community that’s rather isolated and not yet fully built. It was there that I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, perhaps the best post-apocalyptic novel ever written, and the one that should put paid to the idea — one I often find myself holding, to be honest — that a post-global-disaster world is any way fun or a grand adventure.
The link between the novel and the house where I finished it is this: at my wife’s mother’s house, there is a road that winds through the as-yet unfinished and under-populated neighborhood, and whenever I stepped outside, I became aware of how oppressive and inimical a silence broken only by the sighs of the wind can be. It was easy to imagine no one was around; or that anyone who was around had no interest in my well-being.
And when night fell, with no street lights or building lights, it seemed as though nothing, not even the sun, had ever been there.
The location would not have held such a power over me (or perhaps it was a power granted by the setting?) if not for the impact of McCarthy’s writing. He wastes not a single word. The Road has earned a place within my top ten of books.
I can’t say too much about it without spoiling it — I already feel like I’ve said too much — but one of the other themes of the book struck me pretty hard as well. The two main characters speak of “carrying the fire” (viewers/readers of No Country For Old Men may note that McCarthy appears to be alluding to that work with this phrase), and, in a very strange way, this ties into, of all things, Atlantis.
You may read that sentence, note the time of the posting, and wonder if the late hour doesn’t have me a bit addled, but the idea that certain people will escape a world-ending catastrophe and carry within them the seeds that made their civilization great is explored in the otherwise…fringe…book Fingerprints of the Gods in which the author suggests that survivors of an ancient, advanced culture influenced and taught the great city-states and empires of the past: Egyptian, Mayan, Greek, etc.
I won’t pass too harsh a judgment on that theory except to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Mr. Hancock doesn’t quite pass muster on that account by most rigorous academic standards. But it’s a tantalizing idea he’s presented to us — and it’s even present to a certain extent in the works of Tolkien, with the Numenoreans influencing (or, sadly, outright subjugating) the kingdoms of Middle Earth when they escape their island’s destruction. (Note that Hancock, like Tolkien, allows that the subjugation/influence actually begins before the utter destruction of the mother culture.)
I think this is what allowed me not to lose all hope after finishing the last page of The Road and watching night fall on our little corner of Weatherford, Texas, and as I today read the news and see all the ways we’re doing our damnedest to kill each other off and destroy the world: someone will carry the fire forward.
As always, thanks.
