| Simon and Garfunkel – The Dangling Conversation Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I think that the author sadly recognizes that he and his lover can approximate their experiences of reality - and each other - in only a most imperfect way, gaining while losing something of the world's essence through the filters of language, background (Frost vs. Dickinson, male vc. female), and so forth. The more he may focus his attention on his lover, the more he distorts her, and the more he intellectually transforms her from substance to shadow. Indeed, every analysis of this condition (even this interpretation of these lyrics, even the author's interpretation of his experiences through the writing of these lyrics) creates distance between man and his environs, between one human and another. We tend to adopt the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy, becoming observers of (perhaps more than participants in) our very lives. To inaccurately invoke that old physicist, Heisenberg, the presence of the observer alters the content of that which he observes. It is remarkable that such haunting words were penned by so young a writer. | |
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