The world is getting smaller and one day there will be no mysteries
TRAIN DREAMS FILM ^
“There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”1
Robert Grainier is haunted by the ghost of a murdered immigrant, a haunting that burdens him with the idea that he is troubled and cursed even for not stepping in to stop it. They’re building bridges for trains with the trunks of towering trees and the trains are making things faster. And now the blood of a man stains it.
They made our internet faster… fiber… the natural turned wired and splayed underground. We stream, we have home screens with personalized wallpaper (how does the younger generation even feel about wallpaper????), we lock it up like it’s a deadbolt and we are somehow content with living in the illusion and we go inside far more than we were ever meant to leave the outside. Our screens are growing larger with our larger homes and larger aspirations and larger than life ideals for a large life that is just too much to hold in the worst way. Grainier towards the end of the film walks by a television displaying footage of a man on the moon. He had spent decades on an acre of land, cultivating and content. Not just the trains making things faster but now more and more making the world smaller and smaller to communicate in such vastness with such speed. Footage from out of our world.
He meets Gladys when he attends a church and their love is steadfast and simple and winds up a trellis as they dream of a cabin blueprinted by rocks from the stream. Overwhelming beauty surrounding them at magic hour and they gaze into each other’s eyes. It’s the same stream he proposes marriage near and then their daughter, Katie plays among. Robert is there sometimes. Other times felling massive trees to earn a living during the season. They dream of a sawmill. Robert is at home. He can be a father each and every day. It’s a dream… he commits to one more season for one more paycheck. He works amongst men whose camaraderie is founded in their honest work day in and day out. Many die by way of the nature they try to tame. Arn is one of the fellow folks who exclaims in the forest after being struck on the head by a falling branch (he doesn't remember his own name but his demeanor doesn’t change one bit, he’s simple country poetic wisdom embodied)
“It’s just beautiful.”
“What is, Arn?”
“All of it. Every bit of it.”2
Then he passes on— boots nailed to a tree. They say a few words over his and body and don’t quite understand why the man who spoke so highly of the trees they felled was struck by one himself. But they end it with “amen”. And when Grainier returns to home after his proclaimed last season, everything is in active flames and his wife and child are gone. No bodies. No burial. No answers. He becomes one with the place he once had them and waits first for their return but then for life after. For what he is meant for next. A new friend tells him that the "the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit" and laments that we’re “just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.” For she lost her husband the year prior. For nothing is wasted with our Lord.
Joy is inexplicable— where does it spring from? We couldn’t conjure it? Life is an ache one big large ache for what is to come. An ache in the goodness and the suffering. Leaning heavenward.
Towards the end of the film, Grainier stares into a mirror for the first time in a decade after seeing a show in a big town where everything so so very different from what he has beheld on the acre. Moments before his eyes watered watching a costumed wolf boy and that is when I began to cry myself. Feeling this tumble of being human and hopeful and just wrecked by the weight of loss and ache for heaven.
They tell us to lead a purpose driven life and to be extraordinary and continue to accomplish and no wonder on a free day I drive myself crazy trying to accumulate all this doing and checking off. I just want an ordinary life. I want to work quietly and Lord willing humbly and weep when I need to weep and rejoice even when I weep and rejoice even when I feel like how could it get any better on this spinning graciously sphere? I want to be further from the keys I type on now, I want to have a slowness of heart amid all the movement and cling to my Lord in every pace and scene. What a timely watch after feeling the weight of hustle around the holidays… a time where we remember the birth of our savior. The simplest of things to be laid in the manger. And then we make it busy. We make it flashy and extraordinary.
Grainier lived the ordinary with grace in tranquility and grief by the river that fed the land. And “when [he] died in his sleep sometime in november of 1968, his life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchassed a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him. But on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all.”3
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/train-dreams-2025-transcript/
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/train-dreams-2025-transcript/
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/train-dreams-2025-transcript/