Peter W. Flint quoted Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, #5) by Stephen King (Dark Tower (5))
Wolves of the Calla continues the adventures of Roland, the Last Gunslinger and survivor of …
Content warning Commentary for those who’ve already read
That was what all five of them felt most strongly (for Oy felt it too): the sense of something that was wonderfully and beautifully alright.
— Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, #5) by Stephen King (Dark Tower (5)) (Page 182)
Roland and ka-tet have gone todash in New York to see the rose in the vacant lot on Second and Forty-Sixth St. This is the first time seeing for everyone but Jake, who discovered it in the course of being drawn back into Roland’s world in Book 3.
Here we begin to understand the polarity between the Bright and Dark Towers introduced in Book 4. As Roland comes to understand through his experience, the rose and the tower are the same, yet separate. The rose, fragile, resilient, tenacious, surviving against the odds amongst a field of towers in New York, juxtaposes the monolithic eternity of the Dark Tower. Both are nexuses of reality, points of organization, but the rose speaks of allurement and beauty, while the tower represents physical forces such as gravity and magnetism. The Tower marks the way of atonement, the Rose that of forgiveness.
In terms of contemporary mythic imagery, the rose is an illustration of deep okayness. There are other terms for this: contentment, bliss, zen states, etc. It’s a feeling I usually access in meditation but it’s also a feeling that’s always there within each of us. I had it at the beach once with a friend and her kids. It says everything that’s happened, the suffering, the triumph, the anger, the sadness, the joy, the little acts of kindness that didn’t seem to matter have all led you to this moment. It is a sense of wholeness, of fitting in, of belonging to that particular time and place.
Like the rose, this feeling is fragile. Grasped too tightly, it breaks. There are many out there, and darker dimensions of the self in here, threatened by such beauty and will do everything to destroy it, for what is the point of striving toward Conditional Love when unconditional love is immediately present? The Rose is not something to be possessed, but something that simply is, that animating force underneath the sea of being present in plants and animals and people and maybe rocks and stars that keeps us moving even when it becomes too much, that will find somewhere else to grow even when it’s destroyed.
Recognizing this space around the Rose and preserving it becomes the second task in the quest for the Dark Tower. The Rose provides meaning for the sacrifices to come.