Carry the Fire
The Task Existed Before We Did and It Will Go On Long After We Are Gone
When I first read it, I found The Road underwhelming compared to Cormac McCarthy’s other works. It couldn’t match the scope of Blood Meridian, or the beautiful (and, at times, almost incomprehensible) prose of The Crossing or Cities of the Plain. And, of course, All the Pretty Horses will always have a special place in my heart.
But as the years go by, The Road returns to me again and again. This interview does a good job of capturing what makes the book so compelling. The novel is written particularly for fathers, especially fathers of young sons, but there are themes which can inspire anyone. The Road tells the story of a man and his young son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which food is close to nonexistent and any human being they meet is an enemy. They travel on foot through what was once the United States of America in the hope that somewhere the world isn’t quite so devastated, and somewhere the people haven’t resorted to cannibalism.
The father knows that there really isn’t any hope. But he doesn’t say this to his son, whose faith in a better world is undiminished by the bleakness of their surroundings. The father wonders whether he’s prolonging their suffering, and he knows that if he didn’t have a son to care for he would have committed suicide long ago. His body is growing very weak, but he keeps himself strong for his son. The boy is his only reason to go on living, and he does everything in his power to protect his innocence.
The man tells his son they are carrying the fire. The boy has no memory of the world as it was, but the man does and he carries with him that memory. If there is to be any good in the world, they have to be it. There are moments when the father is tempted to do wrong, but he doesn’t succumb, because he and his son still believe in the good. His son asks him at times whether they are the good guys and he tells him that they are. The boy reminds him at times of the rules they require themselves to follow, rules which separate good from evil.
The fire that they carry is the fire of civilization, and if there is to be any hope for the human race, it lies with them. And so they go on living, carrying the fire, despite the hopelessness of their predicament.
In some ways, they are like the men and women in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 who preserve literary texts through rote memorization, or the medieval monks who transcribed Plato and Virgil in order to keep alive the wisdom of the past in the face of chaos and darkness.
I’ve been thinking about The Road recently, and how it’s appropriate at this time of year. Thanksgiving is the holiday where we remember that which has come before us and acknowledge our debt. Almost everything good in our lives is inherited. If we believe what we inherited is good, then we must believe that it is important to do what we can to carry it, to preserve it, to pass it on, to ensure it is there for those who come after us. Those who came before us did this for us, and therefore in our gratitude we must emulate them.
Time wears down all things. Which means that this process of preservation is constant work. It is a shoring up, like a seawall which stands against the waves for many ages, but which fights a losing battle the sea will win. Entropy always increases. The fire will not carry itself. If the fire is to be carried, human beings need to do the carrying.
Most readers, no matter their political background, look out on the world and see much that is dispiriting. Most (often for very different reasons) think we are in for some period of trouble, not nearly so terrible as the circumstances of The Road, but certainly worse than we have seen.
I look out and see much to cause me dismay. There is some cause for hope in other parts of the world, but trouble is brewing and winter is coming. I’m writing this before the election, and it will be posted after the election, so you will be reading this knowing who won. Whoever won will have to contend with deep and intractable problems which threaten to drag our society into a much darker period than we have known, and I don’t believe very many leaders in America are prepared to deal with them, including the current and future president. We inhabit a society which has so much going for it. The greatest technology firms in the world, almost without exception, are here. One quarter of the world’s production occurs here in America. We remain, despite our economic troubles, the wealthiest country in the world. (It isn’t close – if European nations or Canadian provinces became U.S. states, they would be our poorest states.) Our armed forces are still the envy of the world. Our GDP is as large as the entire rest of the G7 combined.
But we inhabit a society which has lost confidence in itself. The entire West has lost confidence in itself. I’m not one who believes a good crisis will shake us out of it. A good crisis could cripple us.1 But as Lincoln said in his Lyceum Address, “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined… could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years… As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” I am decidedly of the opinion that decline is a choice. But for those who mistakenly fear decline is inevitable, there is still reason to carry on. The story of The Road is the story of human perseverance in the face of a world more hopeless than any human being has experienced.
As the days grow darker and we await winter, some are inclined to give up hope. Most of us who are old enough have memories of better days. The young these days are disenchanted with the digital world and the emptiness around them. They long for substance and they long for the memories of a happier day. I think often that I’m grateful to have been born in the twentieth century. The twenty-first century has its technological marvels. But there is an emptiness which pervades it, and which is felt by almost all – secular and religious.
Our world is not so hopeless as The Road. Indeed, we have much going for us. But only if those of us who remember and are grateful can carry the fire. It’s our responsibility to preserve those things which are good, those gifts we have received, so that someday future generations might enjoy those gifts.
Most of us don’t have to go too far back in our family trees to find members who lived through dark decades, and endured great suffering and hardship, greater suffering and hardship than we know. If we’re honest about our lives, we have to recognize that the sacrifices of those ancestors of ours are directly responsible for the lives we lead today. If they could endure the hardship they lived through, we can endure whatever dark days are in store for us.
Perhaps each of us, or most of us, play the role of both the boy and the father. When we’re children, our parents take on the burdens of the world so much that even when we are aware of exactly what is going on, we never lose our faith in the good things of the world. When we’re adults, and it is our turn to take on the burden, we look around us and – like the father in The Road – find the world looks much more hopeless than it did in our youth. All we can do is carry the fire, and raise up the next generation to do the same. Indeed, that is what human beings have been doing for tens of thousands of years.
And when we look back and realize how far we have come as a species – and that the halting, rough, slow, brutal progress we made over that time was thanks not to any great transformation or evolution, but only to the efforts of each generation to carry the fire – we may have some hope that our own efforts will not be in vain.
The Road is a happy story and a sad story at the same time. I take heart in the fundamental goodness of the boy, but I especially take heart in the struggle of the father, who is redeemed though his love for his son, whose existence is self-justifying. There are those who wonder today about bringing children into a cruel world, but how much crueler was the world twenty generations ago and how much crueler is the world of the boy and his father? When we look around us, we see so much to dispirit us. But if we are honest, we must see much to be grateful for as well.
In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb debunks the view that whatever does not destroy us makes us stronger. A broken bone won’t kill you, but it will make your body weaker. A famine which wipes out half a nation’s population doesn’t destroy the nation, but it makes the nation considerably weaker. A coach who pushes his athletes until most of the team is injured can’t field a full team for the playoffs. I could write an entire essay about this concept, and perhaps I will, but suffice to say that there is a difference between the kind of stress or shock which engenders strength and the kind which only weakens – both for the individual and for societies. Most people I encounter appear to lack a basic understanding of this difference, and I see countless examples in fiction of scenarios which operate on a kind of magical thinking whereby strength is created via some mystical transformation rather than through defined processes and intelligible systems.