Thoughts After Seeing the Coen Brothers "No Country for Old Men" for the 3rd Time!

We can imagine we live in a world of large and powerful forces, forces which we can't name, can't understand, can't control. We must contend with these forces, or maybe, really, we just bend to their will. We can imagine that we have autonomy, and we can imagine we have a say in our "fates." But the powerful forces that hover above and around us don't really take our imaginings into account.

We can imagine we live in a world of power and probabilities. We can imagine that everything is basically a coin toss and every decision, every event in our lives is an event of luck and percentages. We can imagine that there are other forces and reasons to our lives, but again, our imaginations are pretty much bounded by our heads.

Our hopes and dreams are vanities.  But maybe we do need a little bit of vanity to carry on. But those forces that guide and bound our lives don't really care and aren't influenced by our imaginings, or vanities, or reasons. It's a hard, clear-eyed way of looking at existence. Maybe it's no country for old men, and really, we are all old, or will be old. We are all implicated in this hard country.

Still, it is the country we live in. And living, is our thing, and living does have it's upside. Sometimes.