The Road 1

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

110

This vividly desolate passage reveals the utter indifference of the universe to the plight of man, a cosmic condition that he takes to be the "absolute truth of the world." The earth continues to revolve, "cold" and "relentless," indifferent to the sufferings of its inhabitants. Furthermore, the earth is "intestate," a word used to describe a person who has died without leaving behind a legitimate will. In other words, in its own death from whatever calamity has struck, the earth has left no future, no means of survival or compensation for its survivors. Even the sun is blindly indifferent in the midst of the "crushing black vacuum of the universe," which extends far beyond the human world of just the earth and the sun. Yet the survivors really exist for the moment, somehow. The hunted animals probably represent the man and the boy, living in spite of the universe's disinterest, witnessing this wasteland with their fleeting lives.