I just saw Cormac McCarthy’s latest play aired on HBO entitled The Sunset Limited in which a paroled murderer attempts to talk a college professor out of committing suicide. In the beginning of the play the points of view of the two characters couldn’t be more divergent. The ex-con played by Samuel L. Jackson is a person of faith, a so-called born again Christian, not the fundamentalist type, but through his harrowing life experience he has come to believe the vision of the gospels that there is no higher thing than to help one’s brother, that we are all tangible sources of light given for each other; that we are to follow the footsteps of Jesus. He is sincere and wise in his belief. It has enabled him to live a life of integrity….and with some measure of joy.
The professor played by Tommy Lee Jones has quite the opposite point of view. He has seen the capriciousness of life; he has seen people undone by it; that we begin our lives in hope only to find out that there is only despair in the end; that to hope is only to prolong the agony found in a dead illusion; that we are merely a dying people in a dying world which in post-modernity is a world on the edge of panic. The ex-con asks the professor if he has ever read the Bible, and the professor’s response is, “yes, but only the book of Job,” Which of course for some forty chapters of Hebrew scripture bolsters the professor’s argument, that even the good must suffer the world’s torment. Both of the arguments put forth by the two protagonists have integrity…There is no right or wrong in this conversation. We are caused to have sympathy for both characters, and their standpoints.
We discover early on in the play that the ex-con has saved the professor from his suicide attempt, which was to throw himself in front of an oncoming subway train, aptly named the Sunset Limited. The entire conversation takes place in the ex-con’s squalid apartment, the sounds of tenement living echoing through the walls. As the conversation progresses both parties of the conversation gain more and more empathy for the other’s point of view. The professor sees such palpable hope in his host, and the ex-con increasingly is seduced by the despair of his guest. Finally after discussing the philosophical intricacies of life and death, which is McCarthy’s genius, the two share a fine meal….a last supper perhaps, or perhaps a nurturing Eucharist for the way ahead….the professor leaves finally after the ex-con, deeply troubled at his guest’s leaving, unlocks the several locks of the door for him and off he goes, but not without gratitude, into the night… and we never know how things end, or begin again…the play is left unresolved in the recesses of our imaginations….Our own sensibilities caught in the great paradox of life…between hope and despair…the dark and the light….both spun into the warp and woof of reality.
We approach Ash Wednesday in the Church next week…It is a time to look at life with integrity…to get real, as it were….to own up to the reality that we are mortal…that we do indeed go down to the dust….that what is left of us after the fiery trials of life is ash….but also we must hold on to the promise that we are light….that the light of humankind has overcome the dark in ways heroic and in ways mundane…In the play the despairing professor, in spite of his intellectual certainty about the meaninglessness of life, can’t deny that there was one who with great sacrifice saved him from death…took him in…fed him …and freed him to his own destiny…I wonder if the professor as he walked down the mean corridors of the tenement and out towards the subway station….I wonder if he was changed by such love….for such love is real, love, luminous and warm, like light…. in spite of the mere fact that we are but ash and we are but dust.
