Imagine yourself alone in a nameless city perfectly resembling a post-war portrait. Towering rubbles and decaying bodies scattered everywhere you go; a harrowing scene that would best describe what a nightmare is. Imagine that this is real. In a blink of an eye, the world as you know it is now an ash land devoid of its flora and fauna, leaving you and other few survivors the choice to either live or die, to survive or to perish, to go on or to lose hope. The choice is yours. And with all the integrity left of your humanity amidst the harshest of all human conditions, what will you choose?
This is a hypothetical question that has been haunting me ever since I learned of Nostradamus, the Mayan prophecies, the four horsemen of Revelations, and all the events that will lead to the "end-of-the-world" phenomenon. They call it the 'Apocalypse'.
It was during my senior year in high school when the subject first tickled my imagination. I remember watching the movie Left Behind and witnessed how the "believers" of Jesus Christ suddenly vanished without a single trace, leaving the "nonbelievers" behind. Then came the biblical prophecies: the parable of ten virgins, the “rapture”, the “second coming”, the satanic 666, and the symbolical two beasts: the “beast of the sea” and the “beast of the earth”, which will turn out to be the "antichrist" couple at the end of times. I can still recall how it shook my spirituality and left me sleepless for some nights.
Fast forward to the present time, I'm still in awe on how stories from this specific genre still capture my interest. It makes me wonder about the fate that awaits our world in the future. But no matter how rich the literature is, only few fictional stories really moulded my perception about the 'Apocalypse' and the ‘life’ beyond it.
Every once in a while, a book changes how a person views his world. The Road did that to me.
It was a chance encounter. The cover shows a man hugging his child in a very dark and heart-breaking backdrop. Upon reading its back cover, I found out that the book has a post-apocalyptic theme so I grabbed it right away. Unbeknownst to me, The Road is actually Cormac McCarthy's magnum opus and was even awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. I fell in love with this heart-wrenching masterpiece not because of its 'goodness' but of the 'darkness' which deeply engulfed my imagination and left me emotionally disturbed for quite some time. I even watched its movie adaptation which stars Lord of the Ring's Viggo Mortensen and was equally surprised by its compelling power and substance.
Using a cryptic but clear style of writing uniquely of his own, McCarthy tells the story of a father and his son who has survived an unknown cataclysm that left the world shattered and almost lifeless. Bringing only a grocery cart containing all of their belongings, they took the road and started travelling towards the south with hopes of finding safe haven in the end. Their profound journey continues as they struggle to survive in a world that is now dominated by cannibalism, hunger, death, and hopelessness. And as they come face-to-face with death every day, they would learn that keeping the "fire" within them still proves to be the best way to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds and still be "human" after all.
"You remember what you want to forget and you forget what you want to remember" is the novel's battle cry which speaks for the bleak and gloomy mood that the story has to offer. It is not the 'bad dreams' that one should be worried about because that means you're still fighting, as said by the father. Pain is a key to survival. It reminds me of my fellow countrymen under extreme conditions yet still manages to survive on a daily basis. Perhaps the pain of hunger is the main catalyst why most poverty-stricken Filipinos are able to think of ways to survive or, if they’re lucky enough, come out of it and make “rags-to-riches” stories out of their own lives.
But by just reading between the lines, I fully captured what The Road intends to impart.
Our planet is a "ticking time bomb". Some scientists might say that the end is yet to come because its expiration date may still be billion years away. But times have changed and our planet's irreversible extinction may be sooner than we actually thought. Beyond the unconditional fatherly love that the book portrays is a lesson that human civilization has been struggling to learn for ages. We've been warned about the green house effect, the hole in the ozone layer, the continuous threats of the global warming, and all the man-made phenomena here and there. They are the anatomy of every natural disaster that shook the whole world. And if we don't start changing our ways, the world as we know it will gradually turn into the dark ash land just like in The Road. Who knows? It could be ten or twenty years from now.
Without a doubt, The Road is a haunting tale of survival, love, and most importantly, life. If history taught me one thing, it would be the reality that life is all about choices. I've always been fascinated about the 'Apocalypse' but to tell you the truth, it is the darkest parts of our past that thrills me the most. From the dark Holocaust of WWII to the horrendous 9/11 attacks in the U.S., all of these human tragedies have proven how futile a single human life can be once the universe conspires to take such a huge quantity of casualties. These are the ‘signs’ that we ought to take heed of and behind all these is our power to live our lives to the fullest while it’s not too late. No one really knows how much time is left for us but The Road gives us two choices: We can either take the road of creedless comfort or the road to painful survival, with our own integrity still intact. Two roads. Two destinations. The choice is ours.
