Carrying the Fire Through the Vale of Tears
How Cormac McCarthy saved me from pessimism
Today, on the first anniversary of Cormac McCarthy’s death, we pray that his soul has found refuge in the eternal fire. He has helped more people find hope than he could have ever known.
Teenagers often go through an unfortunate phase of philosophical confusion, in which they adopt a set of beliefs that serve as their answer to all of life’s questions and all worldly problems. For some, socialism or libertarianism plays this role. Some become devoted atheists and fall into the trap of scientism, others become what they consider Nietzscheans. The particular trap into which I fell for some time was pessimism. Fortunately, this was not the pessimism of the atheistic variety. My pessimism consisted in an unhealthy fixation with the fallenness of the world, in which little of God’s light ever shines. Pessimism as a philosophical disposition towards the world is not unheard of in Christianity. The Psalms famously refer to life in this world as a “vale of tears”, and Saint Teresa of Avila equates it to “one night in a bad inn”.
The American author Eugene Thacker describes pessimism as “an unwillingness to move beyond 'the worst'.” Although pessimism has many flavors and there are multiple definitions of it, this one is particularly helpful given that it reveals its true perniciousness. The problem with pessimism is not the acknowledgment of “the worst” or the fact that one may believe that it’s a primary characteristic in our post-fall lives, but the inability to move beyond it. The great danger of wallowing in pessimism is that it may lead to nihilism and, eventually, to a temptation toward despair. The man spending the night in the “bad inn” must know that his true home is elsewhere; that his destination is the Kingdom of God. Acknowledging the state of his current situation is good and useful, but obsessing over the lousy bedsheets and the bed bugs is not, as it will distract him from his ultimate goal.
One could hardly call Cormac McCarthy an optimistic writer. He was famous for writing scenes in bleak and gruesome landscapes in which the worst of humanity could freely roam. The subjects of McCarthy’s novels are generally the cesspools of depravity. It would be perfectly understandable if a person of a more sensitive nature were to skip his writing. A novel in which a newborn is roasted on a spit is a strange place in which to find the answer to pessimism, but McCarthy knew that diagnosis is one of the most important parts of the curative process. He laid out the truth of the illness as best as anyone could, showing the world in all its fallenness, and emphasizing its sin and need for God. Once we notice that God is missing, we can then start looking for him. This is the curative process McCarthy helped me understand.
No Country For Old Men
My first contact with Cormac McCarthy was through the movie version of the novel No Country For Old Men, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The film is a faithful adaptation of the text, which is why I didn’t read the novel until some years later. I don’t remember why I decided to watch it, but it came to me just at the right time. My insistence on viewing everything through the lens of pessimism was just starting to become annoying to those around me and, worst of all, it was becoming detrimental to my soul.
McCarthy’s portrayal of Southern Texas is a perfect microcosm of the world from the pessimist’s perspective. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell serves as the ordinary man, whose reaction to the fact of the world’s fallenness is primarily confusion. Man encounters the darkness which characterizes much of the world, and has a hard time explaining to himself the reason behind it. Bell’s first instinct at this inevitable encounter is to hide from it and avoid it.
“Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older. I wish that it was. I cant say that it's even what you are willin to do. [...] I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that.”
Unfortunately, there is no hiding from the world’s true nature, which in No Country For Old Men is portrayed by the character Anton Chigurh. Chigurh’s implacability is like that of death and tragedy; relentlessly chasing after the character Llewelyn Moss. Much like death and tragedy, Chigurh seems indifferent to his victims’ particular circumstances. Using an air gun, he cruelly dispatches people like cattle. He takes out good people, bad people, young and old, and everything in between. Like many of McCarthy’s villains, he seems to be more than human—a spirit or a force of nature—representing “the worst” in all its inescapability.
Sheriff Bell, having been defeated by the reality he has been forced to deal with, is unable to locate Chigurh, and quietly retires in resignation, overwhelmed by the darkness of the fallen world. The grim ending leaves the reader wondering what it was all for, until the very last paragraph of the book, in which Bell describes a dream he had shortly after the death of his father, in which he is riding through the night in the darkness and the cold with the faith that his father is somewhere out there fixing a fire, waiting for him to arrive.
The pessimist’s view of the world is not dissimilar to that of McCarthy’s. This life may often feel like a lonely and cold ride through a mountain pass at night in which we are relentlessly chased by death and tragedy, but the fire of God is never far away. At the end of the road, bleak as it may seem, He lies patiently waiting. Salvation will not come from this fallen world; looking for it here is an exercise in futility. No Country For Old Men reminded me that the path is always bearable when we focus on the light at the end of the tunnel: the light of God and our ultimate home.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road exacerbates the bleakness shown to us in his other novels. In a post-apocalyptic landscape, a father and his son roam the wasteland of what was once America, heading south toward warmer weather. They encounter every possible tragedy, but are insistent on their survival. Cannibals, bandits, starvation, and sickness lurk around every corner. Under their circumstances, despair seems to be the only option, which is why the child’s mother decides to commit suicide.
Throughout the novel, the father instills in his son a rudimentary sense of their responsibility to survive, making use of McCarthy’s recurring motif of the “fire”. The reasoning behind their obligation to survive is that they are “carrying the fire”. The son seems to grasp this even better than the father, who focuses his efforts on survival and pragmatic matters, while the son wishes to spread the fire by helping others along their journey. Unknowingly and out of necessity, the father has distilled an essential Christian teaching to his son. He regularly asks the father if they are “the good guys.” After answering in the affirmative, the child inquires further, “Because we are carrying the fire?” The father nods.
The fire can be thought of as many things throughout McCarthy’s novels: goodness, truth, virtue, divinity, etc. However, I believe McCarthy intends the fire in The Road to be understood as hope. As Catholics, we believe hope is a theological virtue that is awakened in us through grace. In a way, the father and the son understand that their “goodness” is contingent upon the cooperation with this grace, the perseveration of hope, and its transmission to the rest of the world. The father tells his son that the fire has always been “inside of him” without him having realized it. It is not there of his own volition; the fire has been given to him as a gift. They are not “carrying the fire” by virtue of them being good; they are good because they “carry the fire”.
The Road reminded me of the reason we have a duty to carry on through the wasteland of sin: the transmission of hope. We must carry the fire, so that we may eventually light the world with it.
Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West
Although the pessimist may have learned what his mission is and has realized that God is waiting for him upon its completion, he still risks becoming cynical. Having been fixated on the fallenness and darkness, he may come to hate or become indifferent to the world—which is the pessimist’s ultimate problem. As G.K. Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, “The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises—he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.” In a way, the pessimist becomes a sort of gnostic for whom God is a distant figure, while the road on the way to heaven is nothing but a pesky obstacle to him. Before the pessimist can be saved, he must first learn to love the world, and not merely tolerate it.
Blood Meridian is often considered Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus. The story follows The Kid and his experiences with the Glanton Gang. Judge Holden, a huge, completely bald, pale, and particularly ruthless member of the gang, plays a similar role in Blood Meridian that Anton Chigurh does in No Country for Old Men. The violence and darkness that McCarthy is known for present themselves extravagantly throughout the novel, as the gang massacres and scalps all manner of people in the US-Mexico border region.
McCarthy shows us a version of the world that gives us no reason to love it. This resulting indifference to the world allows the Glanton Gang to cause havoc with nihilistic abandon. This nihilist reaction is similar to our own once we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of pessimism. In a sense, a hedonistic outburst is a perfectly rational response to an unlovable world. Why would one care for a world that is intrinsically fallen and evil? What reason does it give us for cosmic patriotism? The world, McCarthy reminds us in the novel’s epilogue, is lovable because the world is God’s.
“In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rocks which God has put there.”
God’s creation ultimately belongs to him. Even though it may sometimes seem as if the world is irredeemably stained with sin, He has created it out of love to be good and has intended that it give glory to Him. The fire of which McCarthy writes is not found only outside the world, but in it—for God has already put it there. Blood Meridian taught me that the world is not something to be hated or avoided, but loved. It is very easy to fall in love with every rock, every tree, and every river once you realize that they contain the fire of God and that he has created them for his glory. Our Lord Himself tells us in the gospel of Saint John: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
The pessimist is right in acknowledging the tribulation, but he must have a reminder that Christ has conquered the world and the battle has been won. Cormac McCarthy was my reminder.