Tuesday, November 06, 2007
The coast and imagination
I assumed they were heading south to be warm, but why specifically were they going to the coast? It seemed sort of like he wanted the boy to see the ocean, but the ocean wasn't going to be blue and alive. Still, he gave the child enough sense of the ocean's magic that the boy, when he beheld it, wanted to run on the beach and touch the sea, even though it was cold and gray. I found that very moving, but I wondered where the impetus to paint the world's former beauty for the boy's imagination came from. Did he just want him to have an internal sense of beauty and glory and magic, even if nothing in the outer world would ever compare? Just something for his soul?
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4 comments:
I like that idea. And he did definitely seem to want to protect the boy's innocence and to help him experience joy.
I wondered about the coast, too. I sort of thought the man expected something to be there: other people, a settlement, something. But maybe he didn't. He didn't seem surprised when nothing was there. Maybe it was just something to head for, since they really had nowhere in particular to go.
Yeah, they had to keep moving, with "nowhere in particular to go." Just up and down The Road.
I could see why the ocean might appeal, just because it's the end of the road. There's nowhere else to go. And also because the ocean is this massive force of nature. There are no more living trees. No fall leaves. No seasons. No beautiful days. No sun. No sunsets — just gray dissolving to black. No stars. The ocean, even though it was dead and gray, still spoke to the soul a little, with its sheer magnitude and its waves and tides and sea sounds.
Yes! And it was possible for them to imagine life still existing somewhere below the surface.
Oh yeah, wasn't the possibility of some giant deep-water squid mentioned?
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