Pliable, tender, open and raw

Nobody saw me cry at Blackthorn Café last Monday. I was rereading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. On my table was a cup of pour-over coffee, a pick-me-up after a satisfying lunch. In the café were two girls, teenagers with make up, taking selfies; they were all in a different world altogether and couldn’t care less about me. It was the perfect setting.

I’ve been inspired by last’s week’s New York Times Book Review Podcast episode, where host Gilbert Cruz interviewed author and Daily Stoic podcast host Ryan Holiday. They talked about The Road with fascination and awe.

The Road is about a lot of things, of course, but ultimately it’s about a father and his son, moving through a post-apocalyptic world, trying to survive with each other. Gilbert and Ryan, both fathers themselves, talked about the book with sacrosanct affection. It is, as with most, if not all, of Uncle Cormac’s novels, a masterpiece.

I recall Gilbert saying something about how his vocabulary expands when he reads any McCarthy novel—the words are weird and rare, but they exist in the dictionary. Fine examples: slutlamp, bloodcults, bulldrums, dogmushers, bogfolk, siwash. Or how it was brought up that Uncle Cormac didn’t like using quotation marks. Or how beautiful his prose is—the way he strings together words and sentences and tugs your heart and soul and mind with the story. Or how utterly violent yet elegantly human his worlds are.

Before heading out to the hospital, I looked for my brother’s paperback copy. The books at home are all over the place. They were not in any particular arrangement—certainly not in the Dewey Decimal Classification System—but I could at least recall a general area where I may have placed a particular novel, for instance. Now the books are even more jumbled. When the earthquake struck, a bookshelf collapsed. The books were scattered on the floor. Neneng, our househelp, put the books back in place. She did a great job of arranging the books, but it’s hard to find a specific book now.

I first read The Road in 2011. My father was alive then. It’s now 2026, Tatay has passed away.

Amanda Petrusich writes in her sobering New Yorker piece, “Grief forces a kind of radical transformation, for better or for worse. I found it to be a shockingly generative state: I’d never been more pliable, tender, open, or raw.” That’s pretty much the state The Road brings me back to, eight years after Tatay had died: pliable, tender, open and raw. 

When I read this passage, where the father in the book pulls the trigger to save his son, I remembered my Tatay in whose presence I felt most safe:

When they’d eaten he took the boy out on the gravelbar below the bridge and he pushed away the thin shore ice with a stick and they knelt there while he washed the boy’s face and his hair. The water was so cold the boy was crying. They moved down the gravel to find fresh water and he washed his hair again as well as he could and finally stopped because the boy was moaning with the cold of it. He dried him with the blanket, kneeling there in the glow of the light with the shadow of the bridge’s understructure broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek. This is my child, he said. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.