As the camera follows the VW up the road to the vanishing point at the film’s beginning is the famous revealing of the helicopter’s shadow on the lower right side of the mountain. The road on which the VW is traveling is also famous and called “Going to the Sun”. Helius is the latinized version of the Greek word for sun, helios. So that is a bit of fun, that we don’t know the name of the road is “Going to the Sun”, but we have, in the helicopter, a reference to the sun. Or so I had ignorantly thought. Looking it up I instead find that helicopter comes from the Greek helix, meaning spiral, and pteron, meaning wing. Without getting into all the etymology, pteron is akin to petition, a supplication or prayer, based on the idea of seeking, to rush or fly, and wing, feather. So it happens that one finds in a petition or prayer an early connection with birds and winged thought.
But, if in helix we find spirals, so too in the sun, helios, we have cycles as well, the yearly revolution of the earth about it, and the evolution of the seasons as a spiritual metaphor for life.