A Sad but Poetic Cliche

There's a train whistle about a mile away, maybe two.  It's six o'clock in the evening, and twilight is rapidly rolling into night.  It's a lonesome sound, a sound falling in pitch thanks to the Doppler effect.  The train is flying through a pine forest on the edge of town, and soon it will be miles away, leaving silence to hover over homes with kitchen windows glowing yellow.  Soon, families will sit down to dinner, talking of work and school and the lumber mill, which might be closing.  A lot of jobs hang in the balance.

If you pay attention, you'll hear the lonesome sound of the train whistle in a hundred movies in which the moment calls for melancholy and reflection.  It's a funny thing: clichés are frowned upon because they're used over and over again, but then that's why they end up as clichés.  The sound of the disappearing train is a very important cliché, one that shouldn't be frowned upon, since someday that whistle is going to carry us all away.

~William Hammett

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