Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Catton

A headlight on a night track is a humble piece of machinery, but Catton turns it into a philosophical instrument. The beam is practical, made to cut darkness, yet it also stages a lesson in perspective: the rails "like all parallel lines" seem to meet, but only in the mind and at a distance. That little bit of geometry is doing heavy rhetorical work. It reminds you that what looks inevitable from far enough away is often an artifact of vantage point, a story the eye tells itself to make sense of motion and uncertainty.

Then Catton snaps the metaphor shut with a dry, almost fatalistic punchline: "which is after all where this train is going". Infinity stops being a math concept and becomes a destination. The joke is quiet but bleak; it carries the historian's awareness that progress narratives (the train, the forward movement, the lit path) are always riding toward the same terminus: time's vanishing point, death, the unknowable future. It's also a comment on history-writing itself. Historians lay down rails of causality, parallel explanations that feel like they converge into a single meaning when illuminated by hindsight. Catton suggests that convergence is partly illusion, and partly desire.

Given Catton's mid-20th-century American context, the image reads like a corrective to triumphal confidence. The train is modernity, sure, but it isn't headed to some tidy station called "resolution". It's headed to infinity: a horizon line that recedes the closer you get, even as you can't stop moving toward it.