Roads through a dark wood

This is an experience I frequently have when travelling, one you’re probably familiar with. I’m driving, for example, across the dreary, flat nothingness of central Florida. Every now and then, some dismal shack hoves into sight, and I ask myself, “Who would live here? Why, in all the wide world, would anyone choose this particular spot to live out their life? Is this really the best they could do?’”

True, in most societies throughout history, people’s options have been very limited. The peasant’s children were doomed to be peasants, the potter’s son to be a potter. Jesus was a carpenter because his dad was. That’s the way it was, and still is in much of the world. But in our society, there would seem to be so much more choice. Why then would anyone opt for a crummy shack in the middle of dreary nowhere when it seems so easy to hop a Greyhound bus to New York or L.A. or Tampa — somewhere that would offer more possibilities of a life? To some extent, of course, that kind of question applies to all of us. Why do any of us end up who we are, doing what we do?

Such lightweight existential musings are the result of seeing a lovely little movie which deals with this very theme. In L’Homme du Train, an aging career criminal arrives by train in a small French town, where he wants to case the local bank for a robbery. Finding the town’s only hotel closed, he accepts the offer of a friendly retired schoolteacher to stay at his house. The two men, both in their sixties, are a study in contrasts. The bank robber (played by Johnny Hallyday, France’s greatest rock ‘n’ roller) has all the gloomy laconic menace of the late Charles Bronson. The gentle, cultured schoolteacher (Jean Rochefort) is soon enthralled by the danger and glamour of the other’s life, which only serves to emphasize the dull banality of his life, spent teaching poetry for over 30 years in the town where he was born.

Perhaps, like his new gangster friend, he could have worn a black leather jacket, held up a bank with a big automatic pistol, and hopped from woman to woman, like a sailor going “from island to island.” Meanwhile, the weary gangster has lost his appetite for a life of crime; he begins to appreciate the quiet charms of a life of pipe smoking and jigsaw puzzles, carpet slippers and romantic poetry. Each quietly envies the other. Both are filled with a wistful sense of how their lives could have been quite different. I happened to see L’Homme du Train at the local OAC film festival. OAC could well stand for Old Age Club, for the audience is largely made up of superannuated citizens (like me) looking for something other than the usual stagnant slurry of guns-and-gonads oozing out of Hollywood.

For us, L’Homme du Train has a bittersweet poignancy. While young people wonder what they are going to do with their lives, older people begin to ask themselves, what have I done with my life? No doubt there are a few lucky people who look back over their lives without a twinge of chagrin — the sort who, growing up, always wanted to be, let’s say, a vet; did become a vet, and found being a vet every bit as wonderful as he or she had imagined. These people always lived up to their own highest standards; they married a wonderful spouse; had kids to be proud of, and grandchildren to adore. A life right out of Hallmark.

For most of us, it’s not quite like that. Our past is more chaotic and messy, stained with shameful acts of weakness and betrayal, of cruelty and cowardice — acts that we still can’t look at with a steady gaze. Ah, if only we could go back and put things right. But we can’t. Each day, we face a choice of several roads through the dark wood of life; and each day we blindly stumble down one or another. When we lie down each evening, we’ve moved a little farther down the unknown road, until we arrive at the here and now, at a destination we never could have foreseen. And tomorrow we again must choose a road through the dark wood.