Life Everlastin'

Earlier this week I discovered and read a short play by one of my favorite authors, The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. I'm still ruminating on the work, and have yet to make any definitive judgments. At times it was heavy-handed; at times it was illuminating. It certainly deserves and rewards further thought.

The setting of the play is simple: two unnamed men, one white and one black, are sitting in the black man's apartment having a conversation. They know very little about each other and were only brought together earlier that morning when the black man "saved" the white man from jumping in front of a train, the Sunset Limited, to commit suicide. The black man, an ex-con who had a vision of Jesus in prison, tries to detain the white man, a professor whose education has slowly led him to a stubborn nihilism, because he fears the man will make a second attempt to take his own life.

The conversation ranges widely, revealing tid bits about each man's past along the way. The black man persistently prods the white man in an attempt to uncover the reason he wishes to kill himself until the white man finally erupts in a nihilistic tirade in the last pages of the play. At the end, the nihilist appears unchanged, and the play closes on the black man questioning God.

For the record, I don't believe McCarthy to be a nihilist. How could a nihilist go to the work of creating great art? What would be the point? He certainly gives full voice to that position, however, in this and other works. His purpose, I believe, is to explore what he believes to the malaise of our age, a steady loss of a moral foundation in a post-Christian culture. He explores the problem by incarnating nihilism in various forms in his novels, and the white man in The Sunset Limited is the baldest expression belief in nothing.

I write this post to share a thought-provoking statement the black man makes as he tries to diagnose the white man's problem. The white man repeatedly asserts there's nothing wrong with him. He simply sees the meaninglessness of it all, he claims, and chooses to do the only sane thing: kill himself. The black man never accepts this answer, however, and he continually digs for another reason for the white man's despair. Maybe it's a total lack of community or the loss of his father or a string of bad luck. About mid-way through the play, the black man shows his cards and reveals what he thinks is the source of the white man's pain.

BLACK: Suppose I was to tell you that if you could bring yourself to unlatch your hands from around your brother’s throat you could have life everlastin?
WHITE: There’s no such thing. Everybody dies.
BLACK: That aint what he said. He said you could have life everlastin. Life. Have it today. Hold it in your hand. That you could see it. It gives off a light. It’s got a little weight to it. Not much. Warm to the touch. Just a little. And it’s forever. And you can have it. Now. Today. But you dont want it. You dont want it cause to get it you got to let your brother off the hook. You got to actually take him and hold him in your arms and it dont make no difference what color he is or what he smells like or even if he dont want to be held. And the reason you wont do it is because he dont deserve it. And about that there aint no argument. He dont deserve it. (He leans forward, slow and deliberate.) You wont do it because it aint just. Aint that so? (Silence.) Aint it?

The black man comes back to this premise briefly near the end of the play:

I got to say that if it was grief that brought folks to suicide it’d be a full time job just to get em all in the ground come sundown. So I keep comin back to the same question. If it aint what you lost that is more than you can bear than maybe it’s what you wont lose. What you’d rather die than give up.

The theological validity of the black man's position is open question to me at this point. He's clearly the voice of Christianity in the play, but I'm not sure how closely McCarthy's depiction of Christianity adheres to the real thing. Nor am I sure how closely McCarthy intends it to adhere. It's too early for me to decide. What do you think? Does the black man, in his attempt to diagnose the white man, express something true about human nature? Does he give voice to a Christian understanding of the human situation? More importantly, does that voice powerfully address the challenge of nihilism?