1883: The Land that Cannot Love
Morris Caplin - The Land That Cannot Love - Taylor Sheridan's "1883 TV Series" and the war within every unfinished soul.
There is a war that has nothing to do with armies. It wages itself in the terrain of the human heart—between what we should become and what we could become, between the self we inherited and the self we are still seeking. Taylor Sheridan, in his tv series 1883, gives voice to this interior battle through the unforgiving landscape of the American frontier. But what he describes is not merely the West. It is the topography of every human soul that has ever looked at itself and wondered: What am I meant to be?
"I looked at this place and saw my unfinished soul."
The line arrests us because it names something we rarely admit. We are unfinished. Not incomplete in the sense of lacking information or experience, but unfinished in the deepest ontological sense—still becoming, still uncertain of our final form. The protagonist finds his answer in the identity of the cowboy, and there is something noble in this resolution. But it raises a question that Sheridan himself does not fully answer: Is the "cowboy" the destiny of the soul, or merely a truce in the war?
What strikes me most in this passage is the dangerous beauty of the deal the narrator believes he has struck with the land. "I could pass unharmed so long as I loved it. And I did. I loved everything about it." Here is the ancient temptation dressed in new clothes. We believe that if we love something intensely enough—a place, a person, a vocation, a dream—it will shelter us, protect us, return our devotion with equal measure. We pour ourselves into the world, expecting the world to hold us.
But the Brazos teaches him otherwise: "No matter how much we love it, the land will never love us back."
This is the bitter education that every honest heart eventually receives. The created order, for all its grandeur, is structurally incapable of reciprocating the love we offer it. The prairie does not care that we wept at its sunset. The mountains do not remember our prayers. The career we sacrificed everything for cannot embrace us in the night. This is not cynicism; it is precision. To expect from creation what only the Creator can give is to set ourselves up for the deepest loneliness imaginable.
And yet, the human heart persists in loving. Why? Because we were made for love—not as a sentiment, but as the very structure of our being. The restlessness that Sheridan captures so beautifully, that war between versions of ourselves, is not a defect. It is a homing signal. Augustine knew this when he wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The land cannot love us back, but the One who made both the land and us can—and does.
The journey, Sheridan tells us, is "the necessary, miserable road between the two"—between the place we are leaving and the place we are seeking. But what if the journey is not merely geographical? What if every external crossing is an image of the interior passage we are all making, whether we acknowledge it or not? We are all leaving somewhere. We are all seeking something. And the road between is indeed miserable, but it is also sacred, because it is on that road that we discover we were never meant to make the crossing alone.
The cowboy finds his identity in the work of his hands and the rhythm of the herd. It is a worthy identity, forged in sweat and solitude. But even he, standing at the edge of the Brazos, learns that identity is not enough. We need something that loves us back. We need a presence that accompanies the journey, not merely a destination that awaits us.
The land will never love us. But we were not made for the land alone.
