High Country News essay. First paragraph:
“I first read Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams outside, leaning against a tree. It was 2019, and my Forest Service trail crew was camped out in a quiet corner of Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness, clearing the Jack Creek trail through a two-year-old burn. In the evenings, after I’d rinsed the grime off in a shallow creek, I savored Johnson’s descriptions of the rough and lonely life of his protagonist, Robert Grainier, a logging-crew laborer in Washington’s forests a hundred years ago.”
“While a major theme of the book is Grainier’s quest for personal redemption, in the film it’s the collective sins of society — the larger industrializing world of which Grainier is a part — that follow him like a curse. ”
I think it’s very interesting how in some places the idea that we are individually responsible (kind of the basis of traditional morality) is overwritten into the concept of “society” or “humans” are responsible. This both tends to let us individually off the hook, plus tends toward despair and misanthropy.