The Road Sections 11-20 Quotes
The Road Sections 11-20 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote 4
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must. (19.1)
We're not sure why The Man has to get up in the night. He's not tending a fire in this passage – maybe to scout out suspicious sounds? Or cough? Anyway, McCarthy's description of total darkness is pretty cool: "a blackness to hurt your ears with listening." And although there's total darkness in the night, The Man doesn't think there's total nothingness. He guesses there might be "[s]omething nameless in the night, lode [rich source of something] or matrix" (i.e., there might be a very anonymous and quiet God out there).
They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the streets caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
[The Boy:] You forget some things, dont you?
[The Man:] Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. (14.1)
Memory becomes both plague and salvation for The Man. The barren landscape that he and The Boy wander across has little in common with the world The Man remembers. It's all ashes and death. So the memories The Man has of a more or less normal world – our world – highlight just how terrible things have gotten. Memory is necessarily tinged with sadness and loss for The Man. That said, he also recalls moments of terrific beauty from the former world, and these provide sustenance and hope – though only occasionally. It would be more accurate, we think, for The Man to say he remembers a lot of things but that he can't help pairing all memories with loss (see 226.1 below).