Ever wake up, eye the room and consider never getting up? It's worth considering. Maybe staying in bed isn't such a bad idea. It was that defender of the concept of man's original sin, Blaise Pascal, who wrote that all of man's problems stemmed from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Philosophy, after all, then and ever since has been about preparing to die.
The Sunset Limited Cormac McCarthy lives out Pascal's one-room maxim--the two characters ("White" and "Black") don't leave a small apartment (for a while)--using their time to consider existence, grace, suicide, nothingness, and a universe with/without divine supervision. Black, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of Christian one can tolerate: committed but considerate, faithful but devoted to questioning his own apologetics. He begs his God for the power to voice Truth to White, played by Tommy Lee Jones. White is a professor of philosophy who has run out of track; earlier in the evening he threw himself in the path of the Sunset Limited model train in New York's subways. Miraculously, he was saved by Black in what could be grace, or misfortune for the luckless White.
This isn't a standard play. It has the brooding beauty of O'Neill and McCarthy's obsessive focus on life and death. What other topic is there for old Cormac anyway? The only movement in the drama involves slight action around a single apartment in a slum; the only conflict is in the dialogue and the possibility that White will leave the room and meet a preemptive fate. Albert Camus, the French-Algerian author, probably wrote the most famous work on the question of suicide. Camus opened his Myth of Sisyphus with these lines: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or not worth living amongs to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer." Why bother? Why wake up? Is there radical contingency or some wicked game of grace and holy meaning? Is "God" just and loving, a "gentle Jesus meek and mild"? Or is he some gnostic overlord, ruthlessly indifferent or (even grimmer) actively on the side of radical evil! With the state of the world, Black and White have a lot to talk about. Both take the debate seriously and personally. "It is personal," White admits of his obsessions and preoccupations. "That's what an education does. It makes the world personal."
Black is kind and generous and honest. And he's chosen to live his life sincere and committed to a higher power whom he is convinced "saved him" in the jailhouse. (Though, as White points out, the bloody episode we are provided illustrates the wicked logic of God's grace.) White repeatedly asks Black why he lives in the apartment. It's unsafe, deep in the ghetto. Black admits that he likes the simplicity and feels his work is unfinished. Why leave? Martin Luther King's picture stares calmly behind the characters, wrapped in a baggie and hanging from the wall. But, admittedly, the best lines belong to White. And Tommy Lee Jones is amazing as the spiky, easily offended and desperate White. As the dawn opens behind their conversation, White is exasperated:
I don't believe in God. Can
you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of
those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe
these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is
to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place.
Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were
actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it
would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and
burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it
was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show
me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I
might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions
and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt
live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The
shadow of the axe hangs over every joy.
What is so powerful about McCarthy's two-man show is that by the end you are can identify with a distraught believer and a hopeless man lost in the bleak labyrinth of nihilism. For White, "the good" was culture. Meaning and truths, however constructed and buried under a flurry of quotation marks, could be sought if never fully obtained. But the "fragile" and "frail" culture that propelled him onward, according to White, is precipitously vanishing. Slawomir Sierakowski, a Polish intellectual and neo-Marxist, recently admitted in an interview: “In today’s world we know more and more but we
don’t use our knowledge to get together and change the world." He continued, "We use it so that each of us, individually,
can adapt to this imperfect world. That
we can get together and change this imperfect world almost no one
believes.”
Perhaps, if we cannot radically change the world, maybe we can improve it so that we can live decently within it without need of a collision with the Sunset Limited. Then, at least sleep could come a little quicker and waking up would be a little easier.
