"my company [will be] the darkness"

At the beginning of The Road, the man has just awoken from a dream in which he

wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some gigantic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones case up a shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. (3-4)

This nearly translucent creature is what will have been called a man. This is the dream of that creature's ancestor who wakes to mornings in which the sky grays "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world" (3). Guided by our anticipation of this novel, we who are enthralled (to a greater or lesser extent) by star or stone stumble into the deep beneath mountains like disenchanted, cheerless Bilbos to look upon the "black and ancient lake" and see whether it is a dwelling place and whether there is something lasting in it and whether that lasting thing still dreams. We heard once that there would be a light in the darkness and we would be drawn out of the deep and into the light. Even now we can look upon the stars in the night and, perhaps forsaking other loves, surround them with heaven. Amidst a modern kind of desolation, but among memories as well, Charles Ryder saw a kind of light and said "a prayer, an ancient newly learned form of words," and thought:

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

And yet . . . that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. (Brideshead Revisited, 350-351)

But in this dream the light is the dread of prophecy and our descendant "stared into the light with eyes dead white" and did not remember it but "gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark." And we are left to pronounce on his behalf the psalm of his day: "Let this be the belly of a whale!"

P.S. The light surrounding the dream-walkers arrives and reveals that man will be translucent, that the light will pass through him. But in passing through the light only passes over his vitals, as if mocking them, revealing less of his insides than, in the old days, a mere glance would have done. Later, the man will think: "On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?" (32)