Carrying the Fire
“They squatted in a bleak wood and drank ditchwater strained through a rag.”
I can’t be the only person hoping Cormac McCarthy never writes another book. Not because I won’t read it. Not because somebody won’t make a movie out of it. I hope he never writes another book because I have so little time to read I cannot keep reading the same book over, and over.
My father taught me to swim. He taught me to fish and how to clean fish. He taught me to box and in the basement laundry room of our house he taught me how to do push-ups and run from junkyard dogs. He set me on sandbars and said if I wanted to learn to swim I should swim to shore.
The man in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road teaches his young son how to blow his brains out if the bad guys should come. The man, all the time dying, all the time suffering, shows his young son how to survive because they must survive because they are the good guys. They are carrying the fire. The man in this story tells these lies to his son because he remembers the world the way it was and though he believes it can never be that way again he needs his son to believe. But the bad guys are coming and coming and coming.
I keep a short list of books that changed the way I read and think about this world. Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit. And, now, The Road. The movie is scheduled for release in September 2009. You will wish you had read the book.
