the road
although the story is as slow, long and winding as the journey therein described, cormac mccarthy's haunting touch of symbolism and allegory is remarkable. select passages which struck this reader follow... an abstract purposefulness guided by the state of an empty, tortured land...
"Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a flash of knives in a cave." p.35
"Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands." p.44
"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it." p.110
"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not." p.111
"'Where men can't live gods fare no better.'" [old man] p.145
"...dwindling slowly on the road behind them like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever." p.147
"Bleak dawn in the east. The alien sun commencing its cold transit." p.150
"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 as silently as eyes." p.152
"...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." p.153
"I was crying. But you didn't wake up./ I'm sorry. I was just so tired./ I meant in the dream." p.154
"Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of." p. 181
"The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin. ...and listened to the roll of the surf in the bay. The long shudder and fall of it. ..." p.184
"There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead." p.194
"Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts." p. 230
posted by viGilante @ 12/09/2008 03:12:00 a.m.
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