A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. A... Paperboy?

Carson McCullers paints a picture of an all night diner very strategically in the minds of the readers.  The narrator says, “It was raining that morning, and still very dark,” (line 1) only to juxtapose it with the café- “after the raw, empty street the café seemed friendly and bright,” (line 4). Inside however, it proves to be more than just a reprieve from a young man’s paper route- the café offers an anecdote and a life lesson, while the details describing the café parallel the irony of this lesson.

            The description of the café given by the narrator subconsciously sets the mood and establishes a theme in the reader’s mind. Although it appears to be cheery from the outside, the service is poor and the company is practically nonexistent. The café is nearly empty, and although the young boy sometimes finds friendly conversation with the other customers, none of them seem particularly sociable on the morning this story takes place, with one exception. Inside, with a stingy cook and quiet accomplices, the café conveys a sense of loneliness that underlies the entire message of the story.

            The only café-goer who appears to be in a talkative mood during the story is an old man drinking alone, who attempts to impart his wisdom upon the young man, after confessing that he loves him. After his wife left him, he was so upset that he searched frantically for her all over the country, but without luck. Since then he has begun practicing what some would consider a new religion- he has transformed his love for her into a love for everything around him i.e. a tree, a rock, a cloud. He claims that this method has completely cured his broken heart; he even has it down to a fine science, the end result being his love transferring again to the love of another person (but he isn’t there yet). Most readers, however, would then begin to question how happy the man could really be if he’s sitting by himself in an all-night café, telling and retelling his story to whoever will listen. His ideas are much like the café: appealing on the outside, but in all actuality really very depressing.

A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud: A Twelve-step Program

A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud: A Twelve-step Program

            For many it is love at first sight, for others it is a spiritual journey: the quest for love. In Carson McCullers’ “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud,” we explore the fundamentals and experiences of love through the stories of a forsaken man, and through his words, learn of a “science” to love: “I am talking about love… With me it is a science”, (McCullers 29). The thought-evoking short story, written in the perspective of an unnamed paperboy listening to an older man, revels in an earthy, unorthodox path of love leading up to “the last step in my science,” (32).

            Throughout the boy and man’s conversations, the man reflects on his past blunders with love, namely his “one year, nine months, three days, and two nights” (29) marriage to the woman who abandoned him. After this experience, the man sought out to find his wife and recover his abandoned marriage. In a turn of events, the man discovers a new “science” to love: ”When I laid myself down on a bed and tried to think about her my mind became a blank,” (30).  His noticing of the memory of his wife evaporating led him to an epiphany: “They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.” His “science” theorizes that one must first love “A tree. A rock. A cloud” (31) before one can reach the “climax,” (31) suggesting a sense of simplicity leading up to more complex emotions.

            The man’s “science” suggests that, perhaps, if man loved the earth and the simple things before they “undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God's earth,” (31) man would be able to properly love a woman. It lays way for a series of “steps” essential to take before reaching the “climax.” In the end, the boy questions the man if he has reached the last step; the man is left pondering. He later responds no: “I go cautious. And I’m not quite ready yet” (32). The man left the paperboy with the words “Remember, I love You” (32) before he left smiling. The conversation succeeding the bizarre events left us with the conclusion that the man was not crazy, and eluded to the possibility that, perhaps, his “science” will allow him to reach the last step and find love.

Leo Keeps Things Real

In Carson McCullers' A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. we are thrust into a very strange few hours of a young boy's life. In the story an old man convinces the boy to listen to his ramblings. They are not the only characters who influence the story though. There are many people in the diner but the one character who truly altered the story was Leo. Leo is the "bitter and stingy man" (27) who owns the all-night cafe.
The old man has the most dialogue followed by the young boy and his questions. Leo, though, is always reliable to interject at any point in the old man's story. It was these interjections that caused me to agree with the young boy in the fact that the old man must be a lunatic. While the old man was talking and espousing all his scientific knowledge onto the young boy I occasionally found myself getting caught up in his speech as well. It was interesting and seemed reasonable to an extent. But then Leo would burst in with phrases like "Some night you'll go to sleep with your big nose in a mug and drown" (28) or a blunt "Shut up! Shut up!" (32). After these outbursts I would feel almost sheepish that I had gotten so involved with the old mans speech. It is as if the old man's words lift us up but then Leo's harsh interjections bring us back to Earth.
Leo is placed strategically throughout the story. It seems like the old man is always reaching a key point in his speech when Leo interrupts and ruins the flow of his words. The old man does not appear to be too phased by these interruptions and just shrugs it off and almost always keeps his focus entirely on the boy. For this reason I almost feel more inclined to look down upon the old man and his story because Leo is constantly poking and prodding him but it does not phase him. If it were not for Leo, this story would have a very different tone and the boy probably would have perceived the old man's story differently.

The "Science of Love"

In “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” by Carson McCullers, an old man speaks to a paper boy about the science of love. For the human race, love brings not only a feeling of importance but is a human emotion that binds two people.  It is perhaps more importantly nature’s way of keeping the human race alive by bringing a man and woman together for reproduction.  For the old man in this short story, love keeps him alive. Though the old man speaks about the woman he loved and married, he has come to discover that it is the love that makes him feel alive and not women.  As he says early on, “Nothing seemed to finish itself up or fit in with the other things. Women? I had my portion of them. The same.  Afterwards laying around loose in me. I was a man who had never loved.”  The wife the old man loved leads him to discover the “science of love” but otherwise is slightly irrelevant as a bonded partner.  The man articulates that it doesn’t matter what or who you love, but that the “science of love” is the key to existing.  

One of the first things the old man does is show the boy a photograph. The photograph is of a woman who was the old man’s wife, although the paper boy cannot make out her face very well. The photograph is blurred “so that only the hat and the dress she [is] wearing [stands] out clearly.” Her face is blurred though it doesn’t really matter, as the man discovers, who he loves, but just the plain fact that he loves.  In fact, the man tells the paper boy that when he looks at the picture he “couldn’t see her. I would take out her pictures and look. No good.”  The old man marries his wife after only knowing her for three days. Though it is some five years after her leaving, the old man more fully realizes that it is love he craves more than her.  He comes to realize that she “was something like an assembly line for [his] soul.” Through her, he is able to feel completely alive.  The man goes on to say that he will “run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete.” He is able to fully satisfy his necessity of love.  

In formulating and understanding the “science of love,” the old man discovers that he can love anything.  The old man evens buys a gold fish and “concentrated on the goldfish and [he] loved it.” Adding on this “science of love,” the man concurs that he can love anyone, even the paper boy, and indeed needs to in order to be alive.  In the beginning of the story the old man seems to be dwindling.  His face is down in a beer mug and in fact the café owner comments, “Some night you’ll go to sleep with your big nose in a mug and drown.”  By the end of the story, the old man is alive again as “his smile was bright” from interacting with the boy and proclaiming his love for him.  He will continue to thrive until he must love once more in order to exist, and will need to once again practice his “science of love.”

Olivia Elkins

A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. Activity #2

Last week I talked briefly about how we're looking for questions without the easy answers, and this story is full of bizarre moments, strange images, odd turns of conversation, and other quirky or unexpected choices. Look back through the story and work with your group to make a list of at least 5 or 6 of these odd choices, and speculate together about both the reasoning behind these individual choices and what they mean in concert with one another.

A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. Activity 1

I want to begin by thinking about how narrative order, story-time, and discourse-time operate in "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." In your groups, determine how McCullers has sequenced the events in the story, then think about a different choice she could have made. You might re-sequence the story:

• as a "flash forward"
• with discourse-time being significantly shorter than story-time
• with a closed rather than an open plot

Choose a strategy other than McCullers's and collaborate on writing a key paragraph from the new story (at least 5-6 sentences). You might re-write the first paragraph, last paragraph, or a climactic paragraph; whatever you feel best illustrates the consequences of your re-sequencing. As you construct your paragraph, note the ways in which your re-sequencing changes the character, even the "point" of the story.

Reading Quiz Aug 26

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