The whole song is beautiful...
I guess the "perennial quest" is something everyone of us does. It's the search for your personal meaning of life. But why perennial? Well, it seems to me like Chuck has never found this meaning. He stays in his depression ("rivers of sorrow", "oceans deep with hope", "Reaching into the dark") and seems not to be able to get on and lost his hope that he will ever do so. ("Sometimes never knowing, other times knowing too much", "To hang on to the way that we feel" "A hunger that will not go away" "Now there is no turning back").
Well, I stop to write on now, that's the central meaning I interpreted.
The whole song is beautiful... I guess the "perennial quest" is something everyone of us does. It's the search for your personal meaning of life. But why perennial? Well, it seems to me like Chuck has never found this meaning. He stays in his depression ("rivers of sorrow", "oceans deep with hope", "Reaching into the dark") and seems not to be able to get on and lost his hope that he will ever do so. ("Sometimes never knowing, other times knowing too much", "To hang on to the way that we feel" "A hunger that will not go away" "Now there is no turning back"). Well, I stop to write on now, that's the central meaning I interpreted.