Sitting on a balcony above Hayarkon Street. A time of peace preceded and proceeded by threats of war. Fourteen hours of flight puddling in eyelids desperate for sleep that isn't coming. Tel Aviv after nightfall. The smell of suntan lotion and schwarma replaced by fresh blood as one man stabs another. Cars just drive past. No one comes for the stabbed man. He stumbles away.
As morning breaks, I close the book I'd picked up at LAX: The Road, now a major motion picture, by Cormac McCarthy. Finally starting to feel the fatigue I'd desired for ten hours at a crumbling hostel, I walk a few miles to the bus, bound for Tel Megiddo. I'm there to dig in search of lost civilizations and to putz around the kibbutz.
Meggido's a fitting place to read The Road, McCarthy's contribution to post-apocalyptic literature. After all, the book of Revelation tells us that Megiddo—the etymological wellspring of armageddon—is where demonic spirits will assemble kings in preparation for the final battle of God the Almighty. The kings have not yet arrived as I sit on Mount Megiddo, but the nearby howl of military jets portends catastrophe well enough.
A number of my friends—and a student I'm tutoring—think The Road is at best pretty boring. I'm sympathetic to that perspective: Sparse dialogue, little plot, and relentless bleakness don't exactly lead to a riveting narrative. That said, I do wonder if we're asking too much for the post-apocalypse to be much more than searching for food, starving, avoiding cannibals, rinse, and repeat. A man and his son in pursuit of the coast... and why?
Day after day I dig in a small plot, trowel and toothbrush touching dirt untouched for a couple thousand years, covering potsherds and—nearby—a vase holding the skeleton of a newborn baby, preserved in death as it was not in life. Over the course of a whole summer, I'll move several hundred boulders and dig down a few inches, but I'll find nothing of consequence and make no meaningful contribution to archaeology.
The beauty of The Road is that it presents our world and our nature as in a mirror dimly, a shadow just clear enough that we can see what it is, what it is not, and what it could be. In McCarthy's broken world, empty houses, abandoned trains, and cans of food let us know that we're in a familiar place—surrounded by people who are, though more visibly desperate, like us. Those who lament that McCarthy fails to describe the "event" that made the world like this miss the point: Whatever it was, we did it. We don't need to look long at the broken men who inhabit this world to know they are capable of tearing down anything good without any help at all.
With this backdrop of wretchedness and despair, the novel proposes a simple question: Why do we keep going? The man and his son elude capture, fend off starvation, endure the elements, and trudge on desperately toward a coast that offers no certainty of a better existence. How are we any different? What are you hoping for? Why do you carry on?
Many people enjoy reading dystopian literature that places responsibility for destruction in the hands of some despotic government or a calamitous natural disaster—with the prospect that some hero can restore order (see, e.g. The Hunger Games or Interstellar). Fewer are fond of candid depictions of sin and the allure of suicide.
Suicide, of course, is one possible response to the predicament of carrying on. Just... stop. We don't have to live, after all. This is the decision made by the man's wife before the novel begins.
No, I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant...I dont care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes he is. Please dont do this. I’m sorry. I cant do it alone. Then dont. I cant help you... As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. You have no argument because there is none. And she was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they’d sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall. (The Road, pages 57-59, excerpted)
But the man, though he acknowledges the same premises, does not reach the same conclusion. He does not want to suffer, nor does he want his son to suffer, but his determination—only occasionally irresolute—is echoed in his refrain: "We have to go." But why?
The book of Ecclesiastes begins:
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
So it continues for many chapters. Ecclesiastes, like The Road, is relentless. The book details the fruitlessness of labor, of wisdom, of indulgence, of desire—after all, as both The Preacher of Ecclesiastes and the wife in The Road observe, death comes to righteous and wicked alike, and evil afflicts all throughout their lives.
But there is a remedy—a true and effective one—that begins with the question The Road actually explicitly asks the reader:
Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
The difference, of course, is that what never was cannot be, but what never will be could. This is another way of describing hope, the virtue of believing in possibility. And indeed, this is what sustains the man, who fervently believes that each step may be in the direction of greater goodness despite all evidence to the contrary.
Surrounded by sensual pleasures and enormous comfort, most of us are in denial about the reality of our nature as we trudge toward death. We are, as Kierkegaard describes, ignorant of our own despair. Whether this plays out at either of two extremes is irrelevant—both lazy bores and ebullient pleasure-seekers have no idea, ultimately, what they are living for. This is the value of apocalyptic literature: In a stripped-down world, there's a much clearer view of the spiritual battle that really truly undergirds all of our lives. There's not enough Netflix to constantly mollify that nagging thought: What the hell am I doing with my life? But read The Road and try not to ask yourself what's the point of any of it.
A few years ago, fear took hold and enlisted me as a weapon against myself. In the grasp of madness, I began to walk with determination into the path of careening cars for reasons that were as obvious as a parable and as unknown as the truth. At 18th and Bryant, a bus narrowly missed me; a few blocks later, I gave all of the money in my wallet to a tarnished man outside of Duc Loi supermarket; hours after that, having walked several miles through San Francisco unscathed despite a desire for my body to be eviscerated by several tons of engineering, I sat down in front of my therapist and confessed that there wasn't much else I wanted to do with my life but die.
It's a good thing to keep reading Ecclesiastes to the end, because although it's an enigmatic collection of proverbs and poetry, it contains a central truth:
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
Our lives are not certain to be comfortable—and indeed, it is only when we are uncomfortable that we are likely to confront the truth of our nature, of our sinfulness, of our mortality, of our need for meaning. We can distract ourselves quite well, but in the end we need to account for suffering.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible... In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. — Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
The sacrifice that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes could not have known is that of Jesus on the cross. Our own deaths erased and our own frailty ennobled. What is our call? To use our freedom for obedience. To sacrifice our lives that we might save them. To carry on despite fear; to believe despite doubt; to love despite evil.
Toward the end of The Road, the man, near death, reiterates that the boy must "carry the fire," which he says is inside him, has been all along. What is the fire? It is hope, it is faith, it is the conatus—the desire we all hold to persist in our own being despite desperation and suffering. Why do you carry on?