The Road 4

"The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality."

75

The first sentence here indicates that the post-apocalyptic world has been reduced to basic elements, "a raw core of parsible entities," where complexity is a luxury. More sophisticated aspects of human civilization have been obliterated, and the names of such things are slowly being forgotten by the remaining humans, following the things themselves into oblivion. Such things include colors, types of birds, and certain foods. More importantly, fundamental truths and customs regarding human life have been lost. These perhaps include the capacity to hope, or to feel empathy, love, and altruism. These concepts, once "believed to be true," are in fact "[m]ore fragile than he would have thought," too easily lost in the new reality. Significant principles and the words that signify them ("sacred idiom") are forgotten and lost; the objects and concepts themselves cease to be. One can infer from this vision that the process of naming and storytelling lends reality to the object or concept being named and described, while in the absence of naming, memory, or narration, the object or concept no longer exists in a way that has human meaning.