"The Far and the Near" captures the phenomenon of human existence in that we create and assign meaning for ourselves in our lives. The train's engineer exists in his own reality while he is on the job. Over the years on his route, he watches the same homestead and assigns meaning to it; he sees a tidy yard, garden, and two women about whom he constructs a narrative in his mind. This is a subjective truth. If he had never taken it upon himself to visit the two women to observe what emerges as a different truth, it would have had no bearing on the former construct his mind had built. Wolfe's story suggests that the human experience is a subjective endeavor that is subject to change as the mind receives new information.
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