Cormac McCarthy has long been one of those writers I’ve somehow never reached.

I know his reputation. I know enough about The Road to suspect that its father-and-son journey will ask more of me emotionally than I’m quite ready to give right now. Yet one sentence from the novel seems to have escaped the book itself:

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

Why have those words travelled so far beyond the page?

Every summer, I find a good dozen oak seedlings growing in my lawn.

Squirrels bury acorns for winter then forget where they left them. Those which sprout would soon be cut down by the mower if nobody noticed them, so I lift them carefully into pots instead. In fact, I did this over the weekend. Yes, there are pots everywhere.

I doubt I’ll ever sit beneath many of the trees they might become, but that’s never seemed the point.

Perhaps that’s one way of carrying the fire that McCarthy describes: not through grand gestures, but through small acts of preservation. The same quiet conviction runs through Emily St. John Mandel‘s Station Eleven (2014), where the reminder that ‘survival is insufficient‘ suggests that keeping culture, stories, and beauty alive matters just as much as keeping ourselves alive.

Maybe that’s why this quotation sticks out for me. Maybe keeping the fire burning isn’t about hope. It’s about responsibility.

If that’s even close to what McCarthy meant, then I suspect I’m readier to read The Road than I realised.

Join the conversation: tell me about a book you’re a frightened of reading!