outline of four reflections on memory in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

I. The Dream

Your horrors destroy me.
They surround me like water all day long,
they encircle me completely.
You distanced lover and neighbor from me.
My friends--utter darkness. [via Batut: "my company is the darkness"]

- Psalm 88 (Alter)

II. Man and Wife

What do you owe to past love? . . . At sufficient distance from or after too many repetitions of these negotiations, the resulting fragmentation of your life's story becomes a problem. But the only way to recover the whole is to take up the promise. And how can you keep a promise to a dead god?

- Amos at Philosophy KTL

III. Man and Child

"Every family has—or used to have—its own history of the world."

- Thomas Fleming

IV. Fidelity

"The test is not only whether man will rebel against God, but whether he will play God against himself--the God who gives what he promises and the God who seems to want to take back what he has given--as if God suddenly fell into self-contradiction, as if he were struck with madness and simply forgot his promises and wanted to wipe from the face of the earth the sole evidence of his promises, namely, the son that Abraham and Sara bore in their old age, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the people gathered together under Moses's guidance, which the wonderful signs performed against Egypt had revealed to the eyes of the world as a people under God's protection."

- Jean-Pierre Batut, "Fidelity and the Memory of Israel"