This song has no meaning... and nor has anything without the presence of mortality.\n\nOr something like that. This song is an imaginative fantasy of a city full of people who will live forever, never growing old. But having made that choice they cannot escape eternity. The singer has forsaken one bride for a figurative one - lovers say forever but this is really forever. The \'hollow ring\' is how the lure of immortality now seems an existence empty of meaning, but also perhaps a play on the wedding ring mentioned earlier. What have they lost? Among other things, fear and accountability; law no longer has any meaning or force. A still life is a genre of painting, and this life has become a contradiction, an dead image removed from the real living thing.\n\nI don\'t see many alllusions to other works here, but someone compared it to the poem \'From too much love of living\' by Algernon Charles Swinburne: \'We thank...Whatever gods may be // That no life lives for ever; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.\' A song comparison may be with Talking Heads - Heaven, where heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.\n\nThe sterility is both literal non-existence of offspring and having become used to familiar tastes, nothing evokes any pleasure. There are no new experiences. Philosophers have written on what mortality brings to the human condition and to a good life. This highlights that by contrast, showing the counter-factual. Is this vision of immortality as a curse right? What about people who never talk of death, and haven\'t yet had experience of age or loss? Some see mortal life as a burden already. Would you choose immortality?
This song has no meaning... and nor has anything without the presence of mortality.\n\nOr something like that. This song is an imaginative fantasy of a city full of people who will live forever, never growing old. But having made that choice they cannot escape eternity. The singer has forsaken one bride for a figurative one - lovers say forever but this is really forever. The \'hollow ring\' is how the lure of immortality now seems an existence empty of meaning, but also perhaps a play on the wedding ring mentioned earlier. What have they lost? Among other things, fear and accountability; law no longer has any meaning or force. A still life is a genre of painting, and this life has become a contradiction, an dead image removed from the real living thing.\n\nI don\'t see many alllusions to other works here, but someone compared it to the poem \'From too much love of living\' by Algernon Charles Swinburne: \'We thank...Whatever gods may be // That no life lives for ever; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.\' A song comparison may be with Talking Heads - Heaven, where heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.\n\nThe sterility is both literal non-existence of offspring and having become used to familiar tastes, nothing evokes any pleasure. There are no new experiences. Philosophers have written on what mortality brings to the human condition and to a good life. This highlights that by contrast, showing the counter-factual. Is this vision of immortality as a curse right? What about people who never talk of death, and haven\'t yet had experience of age or loss? Some see mortal life as a burden already. Would you choose immortality?