The Road as an Explanation of Love
A friend posted a question on Facebook. He asked something like,
If you were to teach an alien race about what the human experience of love is, what three movies would you show them.
I said, show them The Road three times. I’ve thought of that question and my answer to it for a full day now, and I’d like to offer an explanation. Because the more I think about it, the more I’m certain of it.
Love is desolate.
It is a world in itself — atmospheric, often wordless, intrinsically solitudinous. Love exists alone for the lover despite the beloved, despite its directedness, and this is due to the Problem of Other Minds. We are alone in love, and despite this, it exists within a phenomenologically shared reality which is hostile, tragic, inherently public, and largely uncharted. That the film/story takes place in a dying world, post-catastrophe, dialogue broken by the narrator’s inner reflections, speaks to this point. For living is catastrophic. Therefore, love always takes place within a catastrophe.
Our attempts at communication are always broken by a ceaseless inner dialogue which threatens the viability of meaningful language. This is mirrored by the conversations between the boy and his father: they exist in a shared reality, but one wherein they are separated by a lack of common referents, unreconcilable pasts, entirely different vantage points, and because of this, their shared language is handicapped. Its potential for producing meaningful understanding is halved. This is love’s Achilles’ Heel: meaningful communication may not really exist.
Love is the refusal to shield another from reality,
and reality is suffering. Love can only exist wherein suffering is acknowledged, where injury and pain are allowed to be active participants. It’s as Nietzsche said,
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”
and The Road is certainly Nietzschean.
When the boy sees a family who had hung themselves and asks his father why they did it, he responds simply: “you know why.” Love is not a shield. It is authenticity, it is truth, it is the ability to conjure meaning and joy from the tragedy of existence.
love is a rejection of weakness,
for a weak person cannot love. Love necessitates a profound strength if we consider what love is. As I’ve said time and time again:
Love is a profound sense of caring for another being, resulting in the prioritization of this being’s flourishing over your own desires for, and of them. This is what love is. It’s quite simple. Love is merely allowing someone’s desires for themselves, for their own life, to take priority over your desires for them. Even more simply stated, it is finding contentment and happiness in another being’s authenticity and autonomy.
But this is no simple task. To love is to accept an ethical duty no weak person can accomplish. If one cannot endure suffering, cannot lean into tragedy, cannot subdue their emotional volatility, one cannot love. For loving demands these things of you. It demands self-control. It demands strength of spirit. Hegel speaks of the strength of spirit in this way: “The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.” Can you do this? “Can you do it when the time comes.” Can you do what’s right? These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are to love justly and ethically, and these are the questions asked in The Road.
To love is to suffer,
for to love is to know that even the best-case scenario entails that you endure the loss of who you love, or they will endure the loss of you. The father is dying, and this is the physical representation of what we suffer through the experience of love. Loving is much like dying, for coming to love another is the world ending. Each new love is a paradigm shift, a newly discovered set of unknowns, a new world being born.
To love is to admit defeat and accept a tragic outcome no matter the circumstances.
But acknowledging our eventual deaths is where meaning-making begins. It is the bottom of everything. The more often we acknowledge how temporary our existences are, the more skillfully we can practice authenticity — doing only those things which are either necessary or the directions of our passions. In the beginning, before the boy and his father set off on their journey south, the boy’s mother says “I don’t want to just survive,” and she has come to this conclusion only by being confronted with the certainty of death. Love, by bringing us face-to-face with loss, and tragedy, and mortality, allows us to begin to decide what gives our lives meaning. None of us merely want to survive, we want to live.
