The purchase links below are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I first read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in my early thirties.
I liked it.
That was more or less my reaction.
It was bleak. It was beautifully written. The world McCarthy created was terrifying. I thought the movie was pretty good too.
Then, years later, I read it again.
By then I had children.
And it was no longer the same book.
Not even close.
There’s a moment when the father looks at his son and thinks:
“If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
I’d read those same words before.
This time they nearly destroyed me.
The words hadn’t changed.
I had.
There are some things you can’t understand until you’ve lived them
I don’t think you can adequately explain having children to someone who hasn’t had them.
You can describe it.
You can tell someone that you love your children more than anything. You can explain the responsibility, the fear, the exhaustion, the joy.
But there’s a particular shift that happens that’s almost impossible to put into words.
One moment, you’re the most important person in your life.
Then suddenly you aren’t.
Someone else takes that position, and it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice.
It just happens.
When a father says he’d die for his child, I don’t hear that as an exaggeration anymore.
I hear it as a fairly straightforward statement of fact.
That’s what changed The Road for me.
The first time I read it, I understood the plot.
The second time, I understood the father.
When his son is frightened, I understand that feeling differently.
When the boy is vulnerable, I feel it differently.
When the man is dying near the end of the book, his greatest fear isn’t really what’s happening to him.
It’s what will happen to the boy when he’s gone.
Before I had children, I could understand that intellectually.
After having them, I understood it somewhere else.
Every parent knows a much smaller version of that feeling.
Your child gets sick. It might only be the flu. Rationally, you know everything is probably fine.
But you’d still trade places with them instantly if you could.
You’d take the fever.
You’d take the pain.
You’d take whatever was coming if it meant they didn’t have to.
McCarthy had put that feeling into the book the first time I read it.
I just wasn’t capable of reading it yet.
Maybe we never read the same book twice
That made me wonder how many other books work this way.
Maybe you read a novel when you’re twenty and identify completely with one character.
You read it again at forty-five and suddenly you understand another one.
Twenty years later, who knows?
Maybe the character you once thought was boring becomes the most interesting person in the book.
Maybe the character you admired starts irritating you.
Maybe you even find yourself sympathizing with the antagonist.
The story hasn’t moved.
You have.
You’ve fallen in love. Had your heart broken. Lost people. Raised children. Worked terrible jobs and good ones. Worried about money. Watched your parents get older. Made decisions you regret.
All of that comes back to the book with you.
There are things a writer can put on a page that you simply don’t have the equipment to understand yet.
That doesn’t mean you weren’t smart enough the first time.
You just hadn’t lived enough.
It’s one reason I sometimes wonder about the books we assign to teenagers in school.
A sixteen-year-old can understand the plot of a novel perfectly well.
But can they understand every part of it?
Probably not.
How could they?
That’s not a criticism of the teenager.
It may actually be one of the great things about books.
They can wait for you.
The book stays the same. So where does the meaning come from?
This is where it gets more interesting to me.
If the words on the page never changed, but The Road became a completely different experience for me, then where exactly does the meaning of a book live?
Is it in the author?
Is it in the book itself?
Or is some of it in the reader?
Obviously the artist matters.
Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road. Those are his sentences, his characters, his ideas.
But he couldn’t control the person who eventually picked it up.
And I don’t think any artist can.
Every reader brings something to the work.
Age.
Experience.
Memory.
Fear.
Grief.
Love.
Even timing.
You can read the right book at the wrong moment and feel almost nothing.
Then you can encounter it again years later and wonder how you ever missed what was sitting there the entire time.
That makes the relationship between art and audience much stranger than we sometimes admit.
The artwork may be fixed.
Its meaning might not be.
Dorian Gray and the strange immortality of art
This is one of the things I love about Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
At the centre of the story is a portrait.
Dorian wishes that he could remain young while the portrait grows old instead.
And, impossibly, that’s what happens.
Dorian stays beautiful.
The painting changes.
It ages. It records corruption. It becomes a version of Dorian that the world can’t see.
On the surface, it’s a fantastic Gothic idea.
But there’s something much stranger underneath it.
What exactly does the artwork contain?
Is it the artist?
The subject?
The truth about the subject?
Something created between all three?
Wilde puts a work of art at the centre of a story about youth, beauty, corruption and mortality. The portrait becomes more truthful as the living man becomes less so. The artwork bears the evidence of a life that Dorian’s own face refuses to show.
And then there’s the irony that exists outside the novel.
Dorian wants the man to remain forever while the artwork ages.
History usually does the opposite.
The person disappears.
The art remains.
Oscar Wilde died in 1900.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is still here.
So in some sense, art really can immortalize the artist.
But even that answer doesn’t quite satisfy me.
Because the Wilde we encounter through Dorian Gray isn’t simply a preserved version of the man who wrote it.
Every generation reads him differently.
Every reader brings something different to the book.
The artwork survives, but its relationship with the people looking at it keeps changing.
Which means art can somehow be permanent and malleable at the same time.
Maybe art changes even when it doesn’t
A painting hangs on a wall.
A song exists on a recording.
The words of a novel remain printed in exactly the same order.
They’re static objects.
And yet our experience of them isn’t static at all.
A song you heard at sixteen can suddenly transport you somewhere when you hear it at fifty.
A movie you once thought was about adventure can become a story about loss.
A book about a man and a boy walking through a destroyed world can become, years later, a book about being a father.
Nothing in the artwork had to change.
Something happened to you.
And maybe that’s part of the artwork too.
Not literally.
But the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it is always moving.
The artist creates something.
The audience encounters it.
The work affects the audience.
Life changes the audience.
Then the audience comes back and discovers something new in the work.
It’s almost a conversation that can continue for an entire lifetime.
That might be the real reason to reread books
For a long time, I understood why people reread books they loved.
You want to visit the characters again.
You want to return to the world.
You already know you enjoyed it, so why not experience it again?
I still think all of that is true.
But now I think there’s another reason.
You aren’t only revisiting the book.
You’re introducing the book to the person you’ve become since the last time you read it.
Sometimes nothing much happens.
Sometimes you like it less.
Sometimes you wonder what your younger self ever saw in it.
And occasionally, the same words you read years ago suddenly say something to you that they couldn’t possibly have said before.
That happened to me with The Road.
Cormac McCarthy didn’t rewrite the book after I became a father.
He didn’t have to.
The book stayed exactly where it was.
I was the one who had changed.
And when I came back, somehow the book had changed with me.
Maybe that’s one of the most remarkable things art can do.
Books mentioned
This article contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Not sure what’s next?
Tell us which stories and ideas stay with you. Find a book that fits your taste today.
Find my next book