23/04: Living in a God-Forsaken World
Category: From the Heart
Posted by: an okie gardener
A while back I accomplished one of my New Year's Resolutions: reading a Cormac McCarthy novel. Post here.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of the bleakest novels I've read. The book pulls you into an ashy-grey dead world with crumbling dead vegetation and only the memory of animals. But somehow part of the human race has survived the abominable desolating horror that killed all other life on earth. A horror apparently visited by humanity itself.
The reader journeys with a man and a boy, his son. They are heading for the coast where perhaps things may be better, though the man has no real hope. They scavange for food in abandoned houses, occasionally finding items overlooked by previous travelers. And they hide from other humans, since many have turned to canniblism, even forming gangs that hunt down others on the road. A few people they meet are harmless, mostly through weakness, but no one can be trusted.
The man sometimes wonders about God, not really believing. He tells the boy there may be good people somewhere--they'll be known by the fact that they do not eat their children. But mostly the man just chooses every day to keep the boy alive and move forward, without real hope.
He had had a wife, the boy's mother. But sometime after delivering the baby into the dead world she had killed herself, telling her husband she could not face a certain future of rape, death, and being eaten.
The boy feels pity for others, at least for those others who are not hunting a living meal. He even has qualms about stealing from empty houses. He hopes to meet some of the good people.
How do you live in a God-forsaken world? That seems to be McCarthy's question. Would you turn cannibal, hunting your own kind? Would you become prey? Would you kill yourself, unable to face a future without hope? Would you devote yourself to protecting your own, even without real hope? Would you maintain a kind of innocence, worrying that an old man along the road might starve if you did not share some of your meagre supplies?
(more below)
The Road reminded me of Camus' The Plague. Camus created Oran, the plague-stricken, beside the beautiful, indifferent sea. How does one live in a world with no God? For Camus, one should still do right. A question one character asks is, Is it possible to be a saint without God? Camus' protagonist joins with a small group of others in caring for plague victims. Camus seems to answer, yes, you can be a saint in a world without God. That is what you should be, part of a community showing care.
Eventually the man and boy reach the coast. There is no life there. The man dies. But, near the end of their journey, the pair have been watched by people who do not eat others. The boy is brought into the group of good people. The novel ends on a deeper note than Camus: perhaps there is mystery deeper than the ash-grey deadness.
"The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
Simone Weil, a French existentialist who believed in God. Wrote an essay entitled "Waiting for God," satirized as Waiting for Godot. We live in a world, she said, of mechanical cause and effect that grinds us without regard for virtue. Suffering can pass into soul-destroying intensity which she termed affliction. The world makes no sense. But, there is a second truth, she wrote--we want the world to make sense. We must hold to both truths, and wait. This waiting creates space for God to enter our lives.
Whatever your theology or world-view, there will be times in your life that the world seems God-forsaken. How will you then live?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of the bleakest novels I've read. The book pulls you into an ashy-grey dead world with crumbling dead vegetation and only the memory of animals. But somehow part of the human race has survived the abominable desolating horror that killed all other life on earth. A horror apparently visited by humanity itself.
The reader journeys with a man and a boy, his son. They are heading for the coast where perhaps things may be better, though the man has no real hope. They scavange for food in abandoned houses, occasionally finding items overlooked by previous travelers. And they hide from other humans, since many have turned to canniblism, even forming gangs that hunt down others on the road. A few people they meet are harmless, mostly through weakness, but no one can be trusted.
The man sometimes wonders about God, not really believing. He tells the boy there may be good people somewhere--they'll be known by the fact that they do not eat their children. But mostly the man just chooses every day to keep the boy alive and move forward, without real hope.
He had had a wife, the boy's mother. But sometime after delivering the baby into the dead world she had killed herself, telling her husband she could not face a certain future of rape, death, and being eaten.
The boy feels pity for others, at least for those others who are not hunting a living meal. He even has qualms about stealing from empty houses. He hopes to meet some of the good people.
How do you live in a God-forsaken world? That seems to be McCarthy's question. Would you turn cannibal, hunting your own kind? Would you become prey? Would you kill yourself, unable to face a future without hope? Would you devote yourself to protecting your own, even without real hope? Would you maintain a kind of innocence, worrying that an old man along the road might starve if you did not share some of your meagre supplies?
(more below)
The Road reminded me of Camus' The Plague. Camus created Oran, the plague-stricken, beside the beautiful, indifferent sea. How does one live in a world with no God? For Camus, one should still do right. A question one character asks is, Is it possible to be a saint without God? Camus' protagonist joins with a small group of others in caring for plague victims. Camus seems to answer, yes, you can be a saint in a world without God. That is what you should be, part of a community showing care.
Eventually the man and boy reach the coast. There is no life there. The man dies. But, near the end of their journey, the pair have been watched by people who do not eat others. The boy is brought into the group of good people. The novel ends on a deeper note than Camus: perhaps there is mystery deeper than the ash-grey deadness.
"The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
Simone Weil, a French existentialist who believed in God. Wrote an essay entitled "Waiting for God," satirized as Waiting for Godot. We live in a world, she said, of mechanical cause and effect that grinds us without regard for virtue. Suffering can pass into soul-destroying intensity which she termed affliction. The world makes no sense. But, there is a second truth, she wrote--we want the world to make sense. We must hold to both truths, and wait. This waiting creates space for God to enter our lives.
Whatever your theology or world-view, there will be times in your life that the world seems God-forsaken. How will you then live?
Martian Mariner wrote: