How do you cope with the feeling that something bad is about to happen?
What if that feeling truly points to real disasters ahead?
They say the fear you feel when things are finally going well in your life comes from vulnerability. When you are happy and surrounded by love, your brain switches on its defense system, trying to prepare you for possible loss. It asks, You feel grateful now, but can you imagine how you would feel if all of this fell apart? This fear can sometimes stop us from loving at all. Yet fear is useless against fate. When pain does arrive, it will be hard regardless. It is impossible to fully prepare for life’s good or bad scenarios.
In Train Dreams, Robert is a man who moves through life witnessing one tragedy after another. Having seen so much death, he begins to believe that destruction will eventually find him too. And indeed, loss reaches those closest to him.
Robert is a worker involved in building railway lines in the early 20th century, a time when magnificent forests are destroyed to make way for trains. The joys and devastations of Robert’s personal life unfold in parallel with humanity’s technological progress and the suffering it brings. The destruction comes from felled trees, affecting Robert, the people around him, and the land he inhabits.
Train Dreams tells this story with poetic visuals, showing how humanity carries destruction everywhere in the name of progress, technology, and railroads—into its present and its future. Yet even among all these deaths and losses, beauty still grows. The reflections of nature, moments spent beside loved ones, remain deeply moving like sparks of fire dancing joyfully around burning wood.
And so, when life comes to an end, despite all its drama, love is what stays with you. Despite fear, pain, and grief, there is nothing more beautiful than loving. It is worth risking everything. Perhaps the only thing we truly need courage for is finding ways to protect the nature we are bound to; so it does not disappear under humanity’s obsession with progress, its greatest paradox.