End

Explain the end of the human kind. Simple. Being that I'm in the tone of SAT practicing and taking tests, I'll put it this way. Happy : Ecstatic as The Road : Apocalypse.

Funny, this topic is played around with a lot especially with the Mayan calendar thing, global warming, and 2012 coming up. We have rendered so many versions of what “the end of the world” might come to be -- most seem plausible. Many, like the movie 2012, express an image of panic and chaos and uncertainty. Another clear example of this is R.E.M’s hit “The end of the world as we know it”, the way it’s worded, like an incoherent rant sets the mental panorama of chaos. Scientists disagree on what will happen, some say el Niño effect some say la Niña… some say both.

What all of these have failed to express are the survivors, the after, the post-apocalyptic life. The Road, its narration, conveys a sense of loneliness a grey life, fear, true life struggle. Upon reading, I found myself hooked on the very brief yet profound hints of description provided: however extensive they seem .

“In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their

clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like

ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their

eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like

migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling

issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the

class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time.

But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.” (pg. 14 Pdf file)

To tell the truth, I had to read it over a couple of times to truly understand it. He describes empty, hopeless/faithless, rotting people hollowed out leaving only a crust of their former selves desperately looking for the land of solution. The frailty of the situation is what got me first. He’s talking about how fragile life really is and how old problems simply fade into the darkness because they no longer matter. The last instance, of life I imagine, takes class with it, the essence? That death simply takes it all away. When he asks you (indirectly the reader) to look around, the grey detail of what used to be, he tries to pick up the mood suggesting that they have a long time left, they have for ever. However, the reality of the situation is that ever is in fact “no time at all”. That in the end, or should I say the end, darkness -- death, is very near.