A Distant Train Horn Changed My Perspective

A moment that was formative for my worldview

My childhood was one of isolation. My father, who died not long ago, was antisocial; he never wanted other people in his house and he never went anywhere other than to work. My mother, bless her, was young and insecure, especially about her young child (me). As she told me later, it took her years to believe that children don’t break so easily. For my first five years, I knew little of the world outside of the cage of my house.

One summer night when I was four years old, I was unable to sleep because of the heat and my mother was sitting with me on my bed beside the open window. As we listened to the sounds of crickets, I heard distant noises I had never previously noticed.

“What is that?” I asked.

“That’s a train horn,” mom replied.

I had read about trains (Richard Scarry books taught me a lot) and seen some on TV. So I knew what mom was talking about. Then I heard a faint clanging noise and asked her what that was.

“Sounds like they are joining train cars together,” she said kindly.

“Why are people out so late?” I asked. It was probably not even 10 pm, but for the four-year-old me, it was the dead of night.

“Some people work nights,” mom explained.

Then I heard another horn and the distant, faint sounds of a train engine revving up and the rumbles of a train moving across tracks. I was suddenly transported to that train yard and had a vision of that train moving and that of a person standing by the track. My world expanded almost infinitely. It was indeed a vision, almost a religious one — an experience of another realm, immediately humbling but incredibly exciting (Rudolf Otto’s Mysterium tremendum et fascinans).

“There’s a world out there.” I thought.

That may sound silly — of course there’s a world out there — but for me, it was the biggest experience of my life to that point. There is a world out there. There are people out there. There are happenings beyond the limited happenings of my small unhappy house. I felt different and was forever altered.

I don’t remember what else was said or done that night. That vision of a train blowing its horn and moving down a track in the night, with an imagined person watching nearby, has stayed with me. That realization, that feeling and knowing that there is a world beyond my own narrow experience filled with places, things, people, and events was formative for how I view and feel about everything. It is part of my impetus for life and learning: a respect for all that is outside my life and the desire to experience what is beyond my limited experience to date.

If you don’t get what I am saying, that’s fine, but ever since that hot summer night, that train horn has always been in the back of my consciousness. There is more to reality than what one has experienced. When I think about the philosophical issues I read about, research, and teach, always in the background is that experience of my world expanding far beyond. My world is my world, but there is so much more.

Wish I could package that feeling and share it with the world. It might help.