Patterns

awesome song, awesome lyrics, cant believe im thje first to comment on it!! i havnt understood the meaning yet. would apprecieate if someone could help......relaxing to me actually, the melody and the subtle back ground with the bongos or congos is sooo relaxing

This is one of my favorite S&G songs. Ive loved it forever. To there are two messages, the right out one, "Your life is planned and theres nothing you can to to stop, everything anyone does will happen" and a hidden one ...which I havnt completely figured out yet....I will soon though

wow this is one of my favorites and i'm shocked that i'm the third to comment on it (then again a bunch of people wouldnt expect a person like me to listen to simon and garfunkel) but yeah this song hits me somewhere indise my psyche

I believe this song is about the life stages we all seem to follow…what is interesting is we all tend to go through these stages at approximately the same ages. As teenagers we long to find acceptance. In our early twenties, we long for love, but then in our late twenties we long for freedom, etc. So an elderly person’s life/psychology likely followed similar courses as our lives are or will.

omg i have been a massive fan of S&G for ages, they truely move me in ways no other music does.

i only just discoverd this song, but already it has a place in my heart forever, like Gojiguyver said, it hits my psyche as well, its just so mystic, i swear i was almost high listening to it the other night.

i think its about fate and how we cannot change it until death takes us.

p.s. it also reminds me of those rare times when it is dusk or dawn, and you are in a dream like state of mind, and you think of your life in a very different way. it is othen very very trippy :P in a gentle strange way.

personally, it reminds me of mushrooms, because everything is patterns when your tripping, and that can make you think about how your life is a pattern like everything around you.

And the pattern still remains On the wall where darkness fell, And it's fitting that it should, For in darkness I must dwell. Like the color of my skin, Or the day that I grow old, My life is made of patterns That can scarcely be controlled.

WHY. SO. GOOD? SO BRILLIANT.

we're stuck in our habits, in our minds, in our flaws, we can't escape. and we go in cycles when we think we're moving forward, but really we just end up making the same errors we've made in our past, but in a slightly different way. these errors, these things we can't escape about ourselves are these patterns burned into the wall. "for in darkness i must dwell," we must learn to accept these inescapable truths about ourselves... as much as we want to escape the finite truths about ourselves and live in the infinite, we must rather create a sort of synthesis between the two and dwell in the darkness of the knowledge that we can never live in infinite bliss as much as we would like to.

Existentialism, pure and simple (not).

Anyway, he's singing about free will, but not until the end of the song does he give any hope to self-destiny.

The first four lines set the atmsophere of the song into place.

"And the light from a street lamp Paints a pattern on my wall" The light basically means enlightenment, and since it is placed on top of a street lamp the speaker is unable to reach it. The wall represents his mental barrier. Without being able to get to that light, the speaker will never have a true understanding was his life actually is. We can infer that is what the pattern is.

"Like the pieces of a puzzle Or a child's uneven scrawl" Without the proper mindset, a person could not figure both these things out.

"Up a narrow flight of stairs In a narrow little room" The stairs are how the speaker is progressing though life. The room is what the speaker's life will turn to be. Notice how he uses the word "narrow" to describe both of these. This describes how human beings will never be truely free.

"As I lie upon my bed In the early evening gloom" Still continuing through life without meaning/understanding. As for the second line, gloom is his mental state, because early evening is most certainly not supposed to be very dark, it is how he sees life.

"Impaled on my wall My eyes can dimly see The pattern of my life And the puzzle that is me" These lines represent the phase of which the human notices an actual pattern controlling his life. However, he does not know how to overcome it. In other words, he knows it's somewhere, but he cannot find the truth of himself anywhere.

"From the moment of my birth To the instant of my death There are patterns I must follow Just as I must breathe each breath" Throughout his whole existness, he has absolutely no choice but to follow these patterns. Aging is one major thing we can't control. We will forever keep getting older, still being forced to follow those patterns until we die.

"Like a rat in a maze The path before me lies And the pattern never alters Until the rat dies" There is basically no difference between a rat in a maze and a human's life. Life is a labyrinthic maze of which there is no escape only until death. Death is the only significant change that occurs in life.

"And the pattern still remains On the wall where darkness fell And it's fitting that it should For in darkness I must dwell Like the color of my skin Or the day that I grow old My life is made of patterns That can scarcely be controlled" The speaker is finally accepting no freedom, never able to unravel the truth about life and being forever controlled by a force which will never be seen.