apocalupsis

After an unnerving opening in which his wife the boy’s mother makes her way into the night, the boy says knowingly to his father, “She’s not coming back, is she,” and Cormac McCarthy takes us some ten years memory to the beginning, before the boy, or The Ending, when he gets up to go to the bathroom, there are flashes in the directions of various cities, bursts light up the horizon, a pause then dull, jarring thumps, distant thuds, as the bathroom light dies out never to come back on. That came to mind at 3:37 this morning as I walked out on 7H porch to behold what instantly said “apocalypse.” Ordinariness, a burst, and darkness. 

Ten years later it turns out to be universal, worldwide. We never knew, Cormac doesn’t tell us, what happened or what brought it on. No one in The Road is named as the father, with his ominous cough, heads south with the boy, a grocery cart and a map, and two then one cartridge for his firearm, hoping to find life and warmth. Speculation, I don’t recall whether it was aside or part of the story, was that it was the doing of international terrorists, though what served by obliterating all civilization and returning man, humans, to barbarous inhumanity could only be religion or some other such fanaticism. It will be funny, grotesque irony will have the last laugh, when religion indeed brings to an end what at the end of Genesis One seemed so possible and promising, Ship of Fools Redivivus that in a distant eon beyond the great and terrible Day of the Lord, outsized rodent genuises will call “Noah’s Ark 2” as they devise weapons for eradicating their enemies the giant hyperintelligent arachnid residents of the continent across the sea.

Only a fool could be blind to the havoc that religious certitude has wrought upon creation over our millennia here; the roaches and rats will be gladly shed of us.

Meantime, in PC no snow, but raw, damp chill.

DThos+