Full text: So I just finished watching the movie Train Dreams. It has received multiple Academy Award nominations, um, and it was an unexpectedly emotional movie. , the first hour was super slow, but now that I think about it, I think it was intentional, like it felt intentional as though time started picking up pace as they progressed through the years.
, from like the early 20th century through the twenties and thirties, through the lens of the protagonist, Robert, who mostly remains kind of stuck in 19th century pioneer lifestyle ways. So he lives in a simple cabin his whole life in the woods. Um, he works as a logger wherever the work takes him.
And you can really see the movement of time from horse and carriage to what they call a steam donkey and trains and eventually to cars and highways. And I just feel like that movement is appropriate. So it’s really, really slow at the beginning and then it kind of picks up with the, with progress. Um. I cried as much in this movie as I cried in Hamnet, although with this one it was more just towards the end.
The clear takeaway is how in every single generation progress simply marches on faster and faster, which is why the speed picks up leaving behind individuals before they even age out of the workplace. And it’s not personal and it’s not any one generation. And at some point. One of the older characters says to Robert, that’s the age old question, isn’t it?
In response to Robert’s musings about whether this feeling of being left behind is just him in this time in history, which at this point it’s like, I wanna say the 1920s, thirties, or if it’s always like this, and he didn’t notice it until now. But as the story progressed,
, what struck me the most was how small and short our lives really are, and how soon we reached the age of being left behind by progress.
When you look at his life, for instance, there are only so many years that he can work fell timber, maybe, let’s just say ages 16 to 46. If someone like that is lucky and doesn’t get maimed or killed during that time, after that, it gets increasingly risky and bodies get worn down by that kind of work, so they become less effective.
But the real kicker is when technology shifts so much that old workers can’t or won’t learn how to say, use a gas powered saw like rubber so lifetimes are small is what this movie is showing me. And effective and fulfilling work lives are that much smaller and shorter. There’s a point in the film when Robert is attempting to use a power saw but can’t turn it on. So a younger man steps in to do it and then just tells Robert to step aside and just use the manual saw.
That was a gut punch for me as the viewer. I thought of the book Blood in the Machine, which is about the industrial revolution and the stories of people being replaced by factories. People who had studied and trained, you know, for years and years and years to be able to create textiles, and they were just automatically replaced by factories.
And I also thought of my parents not being able to ever really master computers very well, and then to the changing landscape of social media, capturing audiences to now the boom of AI that feels completely precarious and possibly unknowable. At least to some people. , It comes to each and every individual in her own time. The demise of work prowess. But overall, this character’s life was so small and this film does an incredible job of showing how this one little life, one in which he leaves, no heirs, no real legacy, but it’s still so beautiful and magnificent this little life.
And in fact, there’s this one brilliant scene in which he feels this, or at least that he seems to feel this universal connectedness to everything that I personally find so powerful in juxtaposition to the notion that each of us is also so small smallness doesn’t matter.
Finding that connectedness. Is everything. So in a way it’s a message to each of us that this is an ancient story, one that continually happens over and over again. It’s happening now and it has always happened. Being passed over for a job because you can’t use a power saw is no different from not being hired ‘cause you don’t have an email address and can’t work a computer or because you refuse to have ai write your memo.
It doesn’t really matter all that much in the end. The way you spent that 30 to 40 to 50 years of your work life, what matters is how closely you can reconnect to your animal and emotional self. , The self that is part of the larger, natural, real world around you.
Finding that connectedness is everything. Robert’s life seemed like ancient history by the time I was born. From the perspective of, , how I saw history when I was younger, and yet I am living that same life once again. It’s only the details that have shifted.
