A Tree A Rock A Cloud Postmodernism English Literature Essay

For the section on modernism and postmodernism, I picked a postmodernism short story. The story author is Carson McCullers and the title is A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. In this story, “the old man” discovers his philosophy on love after being in a marriage where he got hurt. Carson McCullers also had her own philosophy on love, which was that a lover was always vulnerable unless he or she loved someone or something from which he or she expected nothing in return.

In the beginning of this story, the old man is sitting in the corner all alone because he has isolated himself from everyone else in the café he was in. A young newspaper boy walks in and the old man gets his attention. He then tells the young boy that he loves him. The old man can then tell that this confuses the boy so he tells him to sit down and he will explain. He starts out by showing the young boy a couple of pictures of a woman and asks if he has ever seen her before. The young boy says no and the old man puts the pictures back in his pocket and tells the boy that the woman in the pictures was his wife. Since the old man said that the woman was his wife, the young boy was thinking what most would think, that she was dead. So he asked the old man if she had died and the old man said “no, I will explain”. The old man goes on to tell the young boy that he is talking about love and to him, love was a science. Then the old man starts to explain that many years before, he had married the woman in the pictures and that she was his wife for exactly one year, nine months, three days, and two nights. The old man then started to say to the young boy that he loved her and thought she loves him as well. The old man saying this to the young boy made me think about the author and what her philosophy on love was. She had said that a lover was always vulnerable unless he or she loved someone or something and expected nothing in return. In my opinion, I think Carson McCullers considered the old man in this story vulnerable because he loved his wife and believed that she loved him. He loved her expecting to be loved in return.

The old man goes on to explain to the young boy that he was a railroad engineer, so he was probably gone from home a lot and also made good money. He also told the young boy that his wife had everything she could want so it had never crossed his mind that she was not satisfied with her life. The old man then told the young boy that he had come home one night and found that his wife had packed up and left. The old man goes on to explain to the young boy that before he had met the woman he called his wife; he had never before loved anything. He had some things in his life that gave him a peculiar sensation, but never a loving sensation. The old man said that when he had met the woman, she gave him beautiful feelings and little pleasures inside; with her, he felt complete. The young boy then asked the old man if he ever tried getting his wife back, the old man told him he tried finding her but never did. So, after many years the old man isolated himself from the thought of his wife. When he thought of her, he could not recall the original emotion associated with her, which was love. He had used a defense mechanism of her memory in his mind. But, when he would look at simple everyday objects in his life, like glass on a sidewalk, or a shadow on a wall, he would have a memory of her and think about his love for her. He told the young boy that after suffering from this horrible experience of love that he finally began understanding the science of love. Only then did the old man finally find peace within himself and had created his own philosophy of love. The old man told the young boy that it was hard to explain scientifically, but he meditated on love and figured out that men fail in love for the first time because the first thing they fall in love with is a woman. They fall in love with a woman without science and without knowing anything about love and nothing to go by. Men undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God’s earth. The old man goes on saying that men start out at the wrong end of love, that they begin at the climax. He then asks the young boy if he knows how love should begin and he says with a tree, a rock, a cloud. He tells the young boy that he started taking different objects home with him and he would concentrate on the object and he would develop a love for it. So, he was doing what the author Carson McCullers philosophy was, the old man was loving something and not expecting anything in return from that object. The old man goes on to tell the young boy that he has built up his own science and is a master at being able to love anything and everything without receiving anything in return. He asks the young boy if he even realizes what a science or in my own opinion his own philosophy could mean. The young boy then asked the old man if he had ever fallen in love with another woman again. The old man then tells the young boy that no, that is his last step in his science and that he is just not ready. The old man then finishes up telling his story and tells the young boy to remember that he loved him.

In conclusion, after all those years of wondering around, isolated from the rest of the world, the old man had accepted his own philosophy on love, which was that men should start out by loving something like a tree, that you can’t expect anything in return from, rather than starting out loving a woman whom you expect something in return from. So, by Carson McCullers writing this short story, she explained her own philosophy on love by making the old man love a woman and expecting something in return.