OKRadiohead: How is the song about mankind's desire to fly without machinery when the kids build a primitive flying machine as you say?
Also, I don't think this song is mocking the space race: when the narrator says "I've seen the circus / I know how they do it," he's referring to his act of jumping off the board "like you would from a trampoline," not to the space race.
I like the idea that the strange phenomena of the last few stanzas are the result of the narrator's first encounter with drugs in the form of painkillers, but I think the most important result of this traumatic incident, the "change" of the final line, is the lesson learned alluded to in the first stanza. The lesson, on the surface, is simply that what goes up comes back down; but probably this lesson is emblematic of the progression from childhood to adolescence and the abandonment of the whimsical and romantic ideas of youth.
OKRadiohead: How is the song about mankind's desire to fly without machinery when the kids build a primitive flying machine as you say?
Also, I don't think this song is mocking the space race: when the narrator says "I've seen the circus / I know how they do it," he's referring to his act of jumping off the board "like you would from a trampoline," not to the space race.
I like the idea that the strange phenomena of the last few stanzas are the result of the narrator's first encounter with drugs in the form of painkillers, but I think the most important result of this traumatic incident, the "change" of the final line, is the lesson learned alluded to in the first stanza. The lesson, on the surface, is simply that what goes up comes back down; but probably this lesson is emblematic of the progression from childhood to adolescence and the abandonment of the whimsical and romantic ideas of youth.