Train Dreams (2022), directed by Clint Bentley, is all but a train of perfect understanding. It’s a quietly somber and solemn piece about the world, our place in it, and echoes of the experience onward. I explore the quiet knowing that moves our spirit, to live to know so much, yet to draw together only a faint understanding of it all.
This post is about the movie Train Dreams. Starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones.
A Faint Understanding
A Reflection On Passings and The Mystery in Being
It did not make sense to you, until it did. A home was a home, until it was there to leave again. Cabins of thought disparage faint hopes, dreading if the snag was meant for you. The emptiness in presence overwhelms you, the dawning of becoming escapes you. A life lived as if your living had happened to someone else. This world is an old place and that much you know is true. It is only at the end you begin to understand…
You are but a child on this Earth, passing in this life for a connection to it all.
Children On This Earth
“There was once passageways into the old world‘s, strange worlds, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly you find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you could still feel the echo of it”
~ Narrator
What passage ways lie hidden amongst the roads you have yet to venture? What have you come to know by the roads you have? Beginnings are always faint. Memories pushed from the mind. You are sent by yourself, bristling your youth to the casualness of shortcomings and violence. Your direction, your purpose — what are those to be? Such are the thoughts that always remain, bewildering and stilling the soul. With a thinking that maybe you can understand everything that is, and to your grandeur there is a life now to be built. Making sense in this way can come so suddenly, like you’re now turned around and headed down stream.
What have you done to deserve the malices of this day? What have you done to deserve its favor? Cook, dine, dance, rest — to be dreamed and now for you to know. To be given as much as there is to glean, captured at the behest of good things. Much of many may not be made known to the world, but of these things are made known to you. Workings interrupted as vengeance creeps, livings you find with unknown origin. Amidst this all there is the yammering, always among the hard work; sleeping to the tunes of song, to escape the dreams you cannot escape.
The Age Old Question
“We’re but children on this earth pulling bolts out of the ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods”
~ Arn Peebles
There are things that follow, and others that seldom do. Bad men have been brought up, and good men have been brought to their knees. To think that if you can figure that out, you’d be standing in places much better than where you now stand. A tune that just comes and plays again. Maybe you won’t just pass out of this world with nothing to show that you were here. Maybe that which is terrible follows you. To which death may find you, far away from the only place you really wanted to be.
As hard as such may be, there will be times in your life you will look back on as the happiest. Times where effort existed at the cusp — and amid — hope. Yet such moments come and go, fleeting as an itch, scarcely noticed before they pass. These mounting cuts upset your soul, whether you recognize them or not. We live in a world intricately stitched together, where with every thread you pull, you know not how it alters the design of things. Who, then, do you make yourself out to be? A grace it is to be something in this life, for years move on with none you can force back.
Faint Hopes
“Do you think it’s too much? How did they… How did they deserve that? Why? Why?!…”
~ Robert Grainer
There comes a fire for all; the ashes of grief is a forest unto itself. Devastation lying wake to what you fear was meant for you. You know now they’re not coming back, a knowing that brings more than tears. There is the faint hope of something other than the truth, though truth be told, it is a newness of experience you must live to know. Thus so you question — is hope still worth waiting for if you can no longer say for what?
All of many things will change right before your eyes; people, no longer who they once were. You are left to wonder if such living is, as it’s always been, or if you’re far different from who you used to be. You would think that after so many years, that some great understanding of your life would be made known to you. Though it never came. Circumstances not of your control bring about a life you can and too must live. Welcoming the follies and endeavors of those you neighbor; among it all you feel more alone.
You Go Through What You Go Through
“It was like there was a hole in the world, and I had more questions and answers like no human ever died before. When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy. You just go through what you go through”
~ Claire Thomson
Best for you to start walking the road ahead of you — the one different among the many others, each with their own path to trot. Yours is different, and certainly, to be different is a good thing. For the world is an old place, with nothing it has not seen, and yet much you have seen too. You come to many things as you see them, and the look you find is accompanied by what you face. There is sadness that eats you alive at times, and at others it feels as though it had happened to someone else.
It’s the voices you can never unhear, the experiences you cannot escape. You are left with so many questions, as if none had known them before, and now you have come to know. It is a passage that proves the threading of all things; never certain can one be of where one thing ends and another begins. There is something for you to learn in this, even when it seems you have nothing left to give. A waiting remains, to see what you have been left here for.
You Better Hold Onto Something
“His life ended as quietly as it begun…but on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of all up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all”
~ Narrator
What are you to make of what is real versus what has been passed on? Does the hope of seeing make way for belief or the hope of not letting go, a waning death that has not yet passed on? Wanderings void of any signs leave many to dream, with misplacements of being from long ago. If only you looked up, to see the toll the years have come to have on you. It may be then you begin to have some understanding of this life, before it has all slipped away from you.
There is something beyond yourself you do best to hold onto. To know a life truly — quietly at its end, as quietly as it began. An understanding that even in your misplacement of all sense of up and down, you can come to know a true connection to it all.
To The Believer
“The last few years he expected some great revelation about his life would descend upon him. But as of yet none had. And he was beginning to doubt one ever would.”
~ Narrator
Cabined Adrift
Tested by what seems the fire missed, amassing in far and you only sit. Awakened to grieve what only grows, the dream that brings the heat in snow. Snowed to blisters, summers to winters; you carry on the light of your flame. Olden by time is what brings you to live. To both live and not know, is a gracious gift.
The Great Mystery
What is it we say of the purpose of this life? Which direction are we to go? In a passage met with both joy and death, what is it that breathes life into the soul? We may hope that, in most seasons, happiness is more than the fleeting sum of lesser happenings. Yet, mystified by what we see — how can we ever truly say we know what is seen? Still, if we can live on, and come to know our God, then this life may yet trace itself toward something like a dream.
“What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him, visit him every morning and test him every moment?”
~ Job 7:17-18
Credit: Script and select images used in this post are from Train Dreams (© Netflix). Included for reflective commentary and thematic analysis.
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