1.
It's a really profound song to me with so few lyrics. REM were looking at the terrifying,, baffling meaning of life (or lack of meaning), through someone's own life, say someone not blessed with great awareness, who lives in any someway / anywhere / nowhere - Texarkana. Just one ordinary face in a sea of billions - probably just like so many others.
This guy is crying out for spiritual nourishment, lost in his desert, "20,000 miles to an oasis", without which he is going to be liable to end up in hell. "20,000 years will I burn". He really needs that spiritual nourishment but can he really be liable for terrible torture if he does not receive it? What kind of a place is this?
Its kind of sad that the guy has self-awareness of the predicament he sees himself in, but yet it may also lead to something positive, "20,000 chances I've wasted."
Then again, if the dimension itself makes each of the 20,000 chances a waste, is anything positive possible for him?
Is it him going wrong or is it the dimension?
He wants desperately to find something like the right path or the answer, and REM further shows us his fallibility, needing help,
"I would give my life to find it
I would give it all
Catch me if I fall".
It's desperately emotional, yet the musical treatment is kind of flippant. These opposites going on show a sense of how lost we are, how great meaning seems to pass quickly in a world which has little time or space for meaning. This is the time space dimension apparently, but it does not have the time or the space for meaning or valuing.
1. It's a really profound song to me with so few lyrics. REM were looking at the terrifying,, baffling meaning of life (or lack of meaning), through someone's own life, say someone not blessed with great awareness, who lives in any someway / anywhere / nowhere - Texarkana. Just one ordinary face in a sea of billions - probably just like so many others.
This guy is crying out for spiritual nourishment, lost in his desert, "20,000 miles to an oasis", without which he is going to be liable to end up in hell. "20,000 years will I burn". He really needs that spiritual nourishment but can he really be liable for terrible torture if he does not receive it? What kind of a place is this?
Its kind of sad that the guy has self-awareness of the predicament he sees himself in, but yet it may also lead to something positive, "20,000 chances I've wasted."
Then again, if the dimension itself makes each of the 20,000 chances a waste, is anything positive possible for him?
Is it him going wrong or is it the dimension?
He wants desperately to find something like the right path or the answer, and REM further shows us his fallibility, needing help,
"I would give my life to find it I would give it all Catch me if I fall".
It's desperately emotional, yet the musical treatment is kind of flippant. These opposites going on show a sense of how lost we are, how great meaning seems to pass quickly in a world which has little time or space for meaning. This is the time space dimension apparently, but it does not have the time or the space for meaning or valuing.