The Road (Post #3)

“They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he’d seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond” (180-181).

The sentence, “the world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes…” was heartbreaking for me. To actually see one of your people eating another one of your own, of same flesh and blood is terrifying. It is scary to think that someone is even a bit capable of doing such a horrific act.

This paragraph was very powerful and stirring to me. The author McCarthy used similes and moving adjectives to bring out the feeling in this passage. As I read it, I felt the hurt, pain, sadness, and dread as if I was living in that moment and in that time. I could see the landscape and the world in their eyes and feel the lost hope around them. Hopefully no one in this lifetime or any other lifetime would have to experience the horror that is displayed in this book.