This song moved me very much when I first heard it as a young teenager.
I think it's about about something Henry David Thoreau called "quiet desperation." It's sort of a theme that John was getting ramped up to further explore, some might say a bit obsessively, after the Beatles' breakup. In particular, there's a [Wilhelm] Reichian feel to it, tinged with a sense of whole-body, organic loss.
The general mood is dark and tragic. Something is missing in these peoples' lives. They're trying to carry on normally, including being dutifully loving to family and engaging in neurotic, distracting pasttimes (the children acting out by holding a seance, looking for solace in another "world"), but they will all eventually regret not digging in and coming to terms with that sadness deep in their hearts.
It's interesting to note that a person might reasonably not come to a conclusion like this one, just reading the lyrics and not hearing the recording. I believe this is a great case for the view that, with the greatest songs, interpretation of the lyric can't be abstracted from the total product. I think the production on this number very much contributes to this interpretation. The ponderous, thumping beat, to me, conveys the sense of life as a laborious, straightjacketed affair, which is a good way of describing people under emotional constriction.
This song moved me very much when I first heard it as a young teenager. I think it's about about something Henry David Thoreau called "quiet desperation." It's sort of a theme that John was getting ramped up to further explore, some might say a bit obsessively, after the Beatles' breakup. In particular, there's a [Wilhelm] Reichian feel to it, tinged with a sense of whole-body, organic loss. The general mood is dark and tragic. Something is missing in these peoples' lives. They're trying to carry on normally, including being dutifully loving to family and engaging in neurotic, distracting pasttimes (the children acting out by holding a seance, looking for solace in another "world"), but they will all eventually regret not digging in and coming to terms with that sadness deep in their hearts. It's interesting to note that a person might reasonably not come to a conclusion like this one, just reading the lyrics and not hearing the recording. I believe this is a great case for the view that, with the greatest songs, interpretation of the lyric can't be abstracted from the total product. I think the production on this number very much contributes to this interpretation. The ponderous, thumping beat, to me, conveys the sense of life as a laborious, straightjacketed affair, which is a good way of describing people under emotional constriction.