9th
“All of life is warfare, in which we drink death like water, and life like wine…” Chesterton
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5). At the same time he seems fully aware that all the supporting structures of belief and moral action have been destroyed: “Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone”(11). The father’s sole remaining referent of sacred idiom is his son. In sustaining his son’s breath, he sustains not only his own capacity for life but for some belief in life’s continuance, in the value of life. This is really an analogue of man’s place in the world, raising the question if structures may be built in air, of dream and story, of mere breath “trembling and brief,” a question intensified by the apparent end of time that appears so near.”
Rowling and McCarthy share the “postmodern turn”. The BIG question is whether any kind of meaning, societally, can subsist in an atomized vaccum where “systems” moral (ethos, ethnos, religio) are prejudged as too dangerous too encourage or allow.
