Eclipse

To understand Eclipse you must interprete the album: the album reflects life as it is.

• Breathe: First your heartbeat begins/grows, you start to breathe and you are born. You get exposed external sounds and influences (like adult's voices saying things you cannot yet understand) but you get also exposed to your mother's cares and worries ('smiles you'll give, and tears you'll cry') and good advices ('balance on the biggest wave, you race towards an early grave').
• Time: You grow up and enter into the ratrace of society, you realize passing of time and experience first disappointments ('no-one told you when to run..') and what it means to get older ('every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time').
• Money: The materialistic phase of your life, working and earning money, not thinking much of the greater things in life. Reflected in even so cliche music.
• Us and them: The elderly phase of life: you have seen it all, and you feel you have done your part. You become narrowminded and start talking about 'us' and 'them'. Like many elderly people do, you retract socially in a more inner circle of close family and friends. Society as a whole becomes less important, because you realize you will not be part of it for a long time anymore.
• Brain damage: In the next phase your brain degenerates, you become detached from the outside world and 'real' people do not see anymore what you think. You loose touch with reality, your mind starts doing its own ways, but it feels to you like the rest of the world is doing strange things ('when the band you're in starts playing different tunes'). You get locked up in an institution or an elderly home, but more importantly, you get locked up in your head, sometimes even purposely by 'making the cut' (lobotomy).
• Eclipse: The end. Finally, all actions and apparent contradictions and conflicts in life are resolved and disappear at the point of death (=the sun is eclipsed by the moon: the night falls for your brain). Even time itself disappears ('all that is now, all that is gone, all that's to come'). At this point everything melts together and you find/realize/experience that 'everything under the sun is in tune' and that all struggles were constructs of your conscious brain). Then the heartbeat stops. You're gone...

I see no messages or judgements, or philosophies about darkness, just a tale about the phases of life. It helps me to realize what lies ahead for all of us. The Dark Side of the Moon is one of those rare works of Art where message, form and performance have come together in a perfect marriage.