See it's the dead that haunt me. I walk and I walk. I turn
around and the road behind me is empty. It's the dead that haunt me
because they remain that way. Dead…
The problem we have with books like The Road is not that we fear the apocalypse. No, it is that we fear the things that come with the apocalypse. We fear the permanence. We fear death; not our death but the death of everyone we have ever known and loved. Our problem with books like The Road is that the dead die; we keep on living, and the dead stay dead.
You see we fear loneliness far more than the end.
What we fear is a world of absenteeism. What we fear is the possibility that all of this could fade away. What we fear is a world in which the dead are dead and there is no one or nothing left to appeal to.
We fear absence, not death. That is the central issue; The Road simply shows us what happens when god disappears.
The Road is the complete destruction of familiarity and the inability to communicate that familiarity to a generation that doesn't know it.
That scares us. God, does it scare us...
Maybe what we need to learn from The Road is the ability to revel in the beauty of broken things; the ability to revel in the stark landscape before us.
The problem we have with books like The Road is not that we fear the apocalypse. No, it is that we fear the things that come with the apocalypse. We fear the permanence. We fear death; not our death but the death of everyone we have ever known and loved. Our problem with books like The Road is that the dead die; we keep on living, and the dead stay dead.
You see we fear loneliness far more than the end.
What we fear is a world of absenteeism. What we fear is the possibility that all of this could fade away. What we fear is a world in which the dead are dead and there is no one or nothing left to appeal to.
We fear absence, not death. That is the central issue; The Road simply shows us what happens when god disappears.
The Road is the complete destruction of familiarity and the inability to communicate that familiarity to a generation that doesn't know it.
That scares us. God, does it scare us...
Maybe what we need to learn from The Road is the ability to revel in the beauty of broken things; the ability to revel in the stark landscape before us.
