The Great Yawn of History
Leaving work yesterday, I felt a lingering sense of uncertainty. The Senate had not yet passed the spending bills needed to keep the government open, and there was a real possibility I might have to work on Saturday. With that prospect hanging over me, I wasn’t sure how to spend the evening.
When I got home, I sank into a few games of chess and then started browsing websites for things to do around D.C. That’s when I came across the 30th Annual Festival of Films from Iran, being held at the National Museum of Asian Art. I hesitated at first, the cold was already biting, but ultimately decided to go. I hoped the experience would offer some cultural insight and give me something meaningful to write about.
As I crossed D.C.’s “snowcreted landscape, the city felt unusually empty, the cold sharp enough to cut through layers. Still, I wasn’t bothered by the temperature or the solitude. It felt like a journey of sorts, and that sense of purpose energized me.
When I arrived at the museum and entered the auditorium, people were already taking their seats. I chose a spot that seemed unlikely to attract others, hoping to avoid side conversations. The lights dimmed, the film began shortly after, and the following is how the movie made me feel:
The journey is the treasure, but life is hard and narrows one’s view. What begins as movement becomes endurance. Limbs stretch forward not because they believe, but because stopping would mean disappearance. People move through the world pushed by some invisible dream, work, expectation, obligation, survival, and even that dream rots with time. Yet the body continues. It always continues.
The people, their lives. Lives we never see, yet they persist. They wake, they walk, they search, they carry. Their days are loops that fold back on themselves, forgetting where they have been and why. Memory thins. Purpose blurs. Still, they move. People survive.
The landscape holds everything. Mountains, roads, dirt, snow, ruins. It becomes a beautiful burial, ragged, cold, but offering a strange sense of return. What disappears is not lost; it is absorbed. The land remembers differently than people do. It does not mourn. It receives.
Narratives intersect and dissolve. A road shared for a moment. A shelter. A meal. A few words exchanged after long isolation. Shared experience exists only in passing, like a hand brushing another in the dark. Connection flares, then vanishes. Loneliness resumes its place as the natural state.
Faith and belief linger, not as conviction, but as habit. Desperation hums beneath everything, never rising to spectacle, never resolving. The margin of life is not temporary, it is permanent. This is where people live: at the edge, just beyond notice, just before annihilation.
Wild life and human life blur. Survival is the common language. Flowers reach for the sun, bloom briefly, then disappear. Ruins remain, then soften, then vanish too. The world does not distinguish between what was loved and what was forgotten.
I think of the lives we cross on our journey and wonder what they feel. I wonder all the time. Their search for work. Their drive to meet expectations of those not around. The pressure of invisible eyes. The weight of unseen judgments. The quiet heroism of continuing anyway.
People live in loops. I live in loops. My fears. My expectations. My own narrowing view. The film does not separate their journey from mine. It collapses the distance. It leaves me standing in the same landscape, walking the same road, pushed by the same unseen dream, and still, people survive. That is the only answer the film gives and it is enough.
In retrospect, the uncertainty of the day, the empty streets, and the cold walk across the city were already part of the film before it began. The hesitation, the solitude, the sense of moving with purpose despite not knowing the outcome, all of it mirrored what would soon unfold on screen. By the time I sat down in the darkened auditorium, I had already entered the same emotional landscape the film inhabits: a space shaped by waiting, endurance, and quiet resolve. The evening itself became a prelude, reminding me that journeys rarely announce their meaning in advance, they reveal it only once you’ve already been walking.
