This may sound off-topic, but think about boiling water. If you boil water in two pots, and one pot is smaller than the other, not only will the smaller one boil first, you'll also have more pressure built up inside the pot. Well, death is kind of like that; it's the small pot. Put the threat of death in the mix and suddenly everything burns with an unheard-of intensity. Death increases the pressure. In McCarthy's setting, death is lurking around every bend in the road, in every house and every pasture. So it's really no surprise that thinking about beauty and goodness – two things that are already intense – would send The Man into a tear-fest.

We're not exactly sure what the fire is, but it seems to have to do with human goodness and decency. The dialogue here further explains the difference between the "good guys" and the "bad guys." It's a major difference, let it be said: the "good guys" don't eat other people, no matter how hungry they get. This is a code of basic moral decency The Man has constructed that can't be broached. ("No matter what," as The Man says.) Does The Man have any other basic, unbreakable principles? What about The Boy – does he have his own set of principles?

The "party game" McCarthy mentions here is "Telephone." (At least that's what we've always called it.) You whisper something into your neighbor's ear, she whispers that into her neighbor's ear, and so on until everyone has heard the thing. After all the whispering and mishearing, the phrase barely resembles the thing you originally said. Everyone laughs at human error, at how we hear what we want to hear, and it's really fun – unless you're Cormac McCarthy and you see the scary implications of such a game. When The Man remembers something, he changes the original memory. (He might focus on one part of the memory, or let his current mood alter his view of it, and thus alter the memory.) What's does all this mean? If The Man truly wants to preserve the past, he can't think about it.