But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Last Saturday night I saw Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. I have been meaning to write down what it made me feel ever since I rose from my theater seat. Daily life so quickly gets in the way of opportunities to mark its meaning. When I returned from the theater, more contemplative than usual, I peered into the windows of my own house—watching things not move. I quietly snuck inside through the back and Molly called me upstairs. She was in her wedding dress, patting down the sides of the white fabric, stretching her arms through the veil. This was the second time I had seen her in that dress.

Later we drove to a neighborhood we didn’t know, to walk its streets and see something new. We removed our sandals and walked in someone else’s yard. She sat in a couch with a “FREE” sign taped to its center, and later leaned against the back of a signless chair. We turned a darkened corner and found a high view of the city. It was unexpected and enchanting. Is this where we live?

As we walked, I told her about The Tree of Life. I openly couldn’t decide if she would enjoy it. In what seemed a way of reaching out to my affected demeanor—and keeping me with her for the rest of the night—she said she’d be willing to watch a “dramatic movie”, and she asked me to consult Netflix accordingly.

The selection process soon fell apart. She stated her preference for something more thrilling than sad. Within minutes our choices were Wall Street and Blue Velvet. We watched Wall Street, and I felt a tinge of disappointment for spending away the wonder I had captured at the theater by watching Oliver Stone’s most tasteful attempt to arouse the base expanses of my brain. The upside was the humor (where humor wasn’t intended), from which we were able to add to the experience. The dated styles and dialogue gave us something to jeer and chuckle at.

There are so many memories and emotions that The Tree of Life called up. The task of putting them all down would be onerous, not unlike drawing a map at a 1:1 scale (a task that Malick could be accused of attempting in telling the story of time). As the days and hours have passed, despite Wall Street and ordinary life, the film has sunk into my consciousness and found the deepest recesses of long untapped feeling.

There are moments in the film during which my self-awareness as a viewer peered out, and I briefly asked myself if I could accept what I was seeing. Images from Hubble, cells dividing, a curious moment between two dinosaurs, a vision of life and relationship outside of time. In each of these moments though, I was snagged by something running beneath and between the visuals, dragging me onward like a lure on top of the water. I was too enthralled with what is perhaps the most ambitious, honest, and true story I’ve ever seen told. Roger Ebert called the film a prayer, and that is true. I was praying by seeing. I was not at the movies, but finally back in a sanctuary. The communion is overpriced and buttery, but I’ll gladly pay that price again to be in brief contact with the places once conjured by the hymns of my youth.

There are specific moments—in the largest, most epic scenes of the universe unfolding and expanding and in the most intimate, wordless moments between a father and son—that feel so true to my understanding of creation that they are devastating.

So much—too much—is brought back by watching the son wrestle with his inner world until something sudden must burst forth as he shouts in the face of his father, and seeing the astonishment and pain on the face of his parents standing in the yard. I can remember with surprising clarity the Saturday afternoon that I screamed up the sides of my dad’s face that he could keep his money, his riding lawnmower, his plans for the yard to himself. I didn’t care what that meant. I didn’t care if I was grounded. I didn’t care if I had dinner or a bedroom. I hated him that day. Or, with some reflection since, I hated the hundreds of decisions he was making each day to be someone I couldn’t know or be, I hated the plain and uncomfortable fact that for as great a man as he was—and he was great—I only felt shame when I held myself up to him. I hated feeling ugly and weak in front of everyone’s favorite man. My favorite man.

We held each other and wept that afternoon, the lawn half-mowed. We knew something fully then that I struggle to remember today. What it is, I haven’t the talent to say.

Not long after a sequence in which the father endures his own fall from power and grace, I was shown something that doesn’t elicit old memories, but instead makes contact with fresh wounds of the present. The father’s inner story is suddenly permitted to speak, as his voiceover allows us his heart, sadly marshaling up the sidewalk after a day’s empty work: I am nothing. At once the father reveals he too was once the son. He too had a head full of what he would one day be allowed to be, only to be wrong. At the ever-ripening age of 29, I am heartbroken to realize that I somehow identify with a broken, unknown father. There, at his bottom, he was the picture of the nobody-man that we American men have long learned to fear becoming. And yet, in acknowledging his nothingness, he was approaching an Emersonian freedom. He had begun to see. He too could grow—could live—until the day he no longer lived at all.

That sequence alone, and the filmmaking that leads to it, are enough to affect something in me so important that the film stands in my mind as transcendent, life-affirming, and terrifying. But there are so many such moments therein, and I suspect more will be found upon repeat viewings. The feeling I wanted to grasp and put to paper was the sense that despite the way I may have thought I would feel if you read me the script and showed me the storyboards, the film itself had me constantly and consistently enthralled. I was aware, at all moments, that Malick was pulling something off, that his alchemy of sound and picture was dismantling previous models and expectations. He made something not simply great, but new. A movie, and something else. Do you remember when it was a regular occurrence to see something for the first time?

To see something such as this—the old made new—is to momentarily grasp the rare conviction that perhaps something wondrous, something Other, something slow and old is just beyond the most distant horizon. If not, then what did I feel? And if so, then what am I? Lonely as those questions are to confess, by asking, we are not alone. By making, we can search.