Cal Poly Sustainability Book Club
Nov. 19, 2010
Catherine Waitinas (English Dept.)
 Bestseller immediately
 Oprah’s Book Club selection; this led to
McCarthy’s first televised interview ever
 2006 National Book Award finalist
 2007 Pulitzer Prize
 2009 film adaptation starring Viggo
Mortensen
 What “would happen if environmental
meltdown continue[d] to its logical
conclusion”?http://rs.resalliance.org/2010/01/
19/cormac-mccarthy-and-santa-fe-institute/
 Could this—or any—book change the world?
George Monbiot apparently called McCarthy
one of his “50 people who could save the
planet.”
 Many literary scholars argue that, regardless
of its aesthetic quality, a book can do
“cultural work.”
 Map of the route in The Road:
http://www.flexiblemaps.com/archives/113
 See also “The Route and Roots of The
Road”:
http://web.utk.edu/~wmorgan/TR/route.htm
 The Road is part of a long history of literary
engagements with the earth and humanity’s
place on the earth.
 Literature can show us what we take for
granted—and how much we have to lose.
Literature as redemptive.
 In a “new world” – Eaarth, perhaps (Bill
McKibben)– literature can provide a record of the
“old world.” Literature as memorial.
Loss: Perdition, ruin, destruction; the condition
or fact of being ‘lost’, destroyed, or ruined.
 Selfhood / identity
 Civilization / community
 Memory
 Language
 Biosphere
Walt Whitman, “The Song of the Open Road”
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I
choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am goodfortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more,
need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.
The earth—that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer;
I know they are very well where they are;
Walt Whitman continued
You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and
give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate
equable showers!
You animals moving serenely over the earth!
You birds that wing yourselves through the air! you
insects!
You sprouting growths from the farmers’ fields! you
stalks and weeds by the fences!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the
roadsides!
I think you are latent with unseen existences—you
are so dear to me.
Walt Whitman continued
Now I see the secret of the making of the best
persons,
It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep
with the earth.
…
The earth never tires;
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first—
Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first;
Be not discouraged—keep on—there are divine things,
well envelop’d’
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful
than words can tell.
Emily Dickinson, “The spider as an artist”
THE SPIDER as an artist
Has never been employed
Though his surpassing merit
Is freely certified
By every broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian land.
Neglected son of genius,
I take thee by the hand.
Emily Dickinson, “Some keep the Sabbath”
SOME keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.
Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;
I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.
God preaches,—a noted clergyman,—
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I’m going all along!
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Apostrophe to Man”
(On reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)
Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia
and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest,
be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacteria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach,
expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.
Page 52: "The clock stepped at 1:17. A long shear of
light and then a series of low concussions. He got up
and went to the window. What is it? she said. He
didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw
the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A
dull rose glow in the windowglass.”
 Why is McCarthy so vague?
 What happened?
 Does it even matter?
Page 51: “He pitched the sweatblackened piece of leather
into the woods and sat holding the photograph. Then he
laid it down in the road also and then he stood and they
went on.”
Page 55: “We’re the walking dead in a horror film.”
Page 117: “In what direction did lost men veer? Perhaps it
changed with hemispheres. Or handedness. Finally he put
it out of his mind. The notion that there could be anything
to correct for. His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not
heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their
sleep. Correct for that.”
Page 153-4: “Maybe he understood for the first time that to
the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that
no longer existed…. He could not enkindle in the heart of
the child what was ashes in his own.”
Page 32: "Within a year, there were fires on the ridges and
deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the
dead impaled on spikes along the road.”
Page 126: “They’re going to eat those people, arent they?”
Page 139: “The richness of a vanished world.”
Page 161: [Even] “by their new world standards he smelled terrible.”
Page 169: “How would you know if you were the last man on
earth?”
Page 181: “… like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. … their
stores were all but gone.”
Billy Collins, “Forgetfulness”
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
Billy Collins continued
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Page 88: “He tried to think of something to say but
could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the
numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking
down about a raw core of parsible entities. The
names of things slowly following those things into
oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat.
Finally the names of things one believed to be true.
More fragile than he would have thought. How much
was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its
referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like
something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink
out forever.”
Page 187: “He’d not have thought the value of the
smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It
surprised him.”
Page 20: "Do you think there could be fish in the lake?
No, there is nothing in the lake.”
Page 275: “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would
be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans,
mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of
things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic
and coldly secular. The silence.”
Page 222: “One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless.
Senseless.”
from T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
This is the dead land
This is cactus land. …
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech. …
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Page 29: “Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?”
Page 68: “You will not face the truth. You will not.”
Page 83: “We’re carrying the fire.”
Page 86: “We could go back, the boy said softly. It’s not so far.
It’s not too late.”
Page 114: “Can you do it? When the time comes? When the
time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse
God and die. What if it doesnt fire? It has to fire. What if it
doesnt fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?
Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?
Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is
quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.”
Page 129: “We’re the good guys.” “Yes.” “And we’re
carrying the fire.” “And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.”
“Okay.”
Page 129: “… he thought it was about beauty or about
goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to
think about at all.”
Page 137: “Okay. This is what the good guys do. They
keep trying. They dont give up.”
Page 151: “I don’t think we’re likely to meet any good
guys on the road.” “We’re on the road.” “I know.”
Page 248: “I will do what I promised, he whispered. No
matter what. I will not send you into the darkness
alone.”
Page 259: “You’re not the one who has to worry about
everything.” … “Yes I am, he said. I am the one.”
Page 273: “… him standing there in the road looking
back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing
in that waste like a tabernacle.”
Page 279: “You have my whole heart. You always did.
You’re the best guy. You always were. … You’re
going to be lucky. I know you are.”
Page 280: “ … they had reached the point of no return
which was measured from the first solely by the light
they carried with them.”
From Robert Frost, “Directive”
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town …
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest
Your destination and your destiny's …
Page 7: "Then he picked up the phone and dialed the
number of his father's house in that long ago.”
Page 27: "This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against
this wall. In the nights in their thousands to dream the
dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such
as might offer themselves but never the one to be.”
Page 136: “… he very much feared that something was gone
that could not be put right again.”
Page 210: “I think maybe they are watching, he said. They
are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if
they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will
not come back.”
Pages 286–7: Once there were brook trout in
the streams in the mountains. You could see
them standing in the amber current where
the white edges of their fins whimpled softly
in the flow. They smelled of moss in your
hand. Polished and muscular and torsional.
On their backs were vermiculate patterns
that were maps of the world in its becoming.
Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not
be put back. Not be made right again. In the
deep glens where they lived all things were
older than man and they hummed of
mystery.”