Carry the Fire by Getting Up in the Morning
How "The Road" can be much like our own lives.
Imagine a world where nearly everything is burnt, where you can’t stay in one place too long because you’ll likely be hunted by cannibals, where rotten food is a treasure found, running water found under a house is a thing of beauty, and names don’t matter anymore. This is a world where animals are a myth, a shadow of another time and you carry all your belongings in a couple backpacks and a shopping cart. A world where you imagine your child will not grow up because you’ll likely die soon, and when you know you’re dying you have a gun with one bullet to end his life too.
This is what, “All hope is lost,” truly looks like.
And yet somehow, all hope is not lost in this world. Though the man doesn’t dare allow himself to think of or remember beauty and goodness, though nobody is trustworthy, he tells his boy, “You have to carry the fire.”1
You have to carry the fire. I dont know how to. Yes you do. Is it real? The fire? Yes it is. Where is it? I dont know where it is. Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
This is the man’s reason for staying alive when suicide seems like the best way to die, for not killing recklessly, for not eating people, for attempting to shield his child from the bodies that lay strewn everywhere, to keep pressing on: they must carry the fire. A light in the darkness, no matter how small; a bit of goodness, even when all else has gone fowl. They must persevere and thus preserve the fire, even in the heaviest rainfall.
This isn’t a typical, heroic dystopian novel. It’s not like The Hunger Games or Divergent where the world is set to right again because they chose to fight for the fire to be hoisted up and for all to follow it. They have not won anyone else to carry the fire with them. They are not fighting “The Man” to tear the authority from his hands and give it to someone who does carry the fire. They are simply staying alive and carrying their fires. They are pressing on. They are doing the ordinary. “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?” the boy asks the man. “Getting up this morning,” he said.2 He played it off as if it were sarcasm, but read this story and you will believe it to be true. They are waking up, and that’s all it takes to carry the fire in this world.
And really, is our ordinary life much different?
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