The Dangling Conversation

Simon and Garfunkel is among my favorite groups from the 1960’s. They take me back to the days when I took my date to see The Graduate while my parents were out of town. Scandalous!!! The soundtrack of my life was Scarborough Fair and the Sounds of Silence. The Beatles were going through their classical period, and styles of music melded together in ways that have yet to be replicated. It was a magical time.

That was when I began to get passionate about things. Everybody around me oozed passion about everything from politics to love. Today, I am involved in a lot of activities. And I am passionate about all of them. Nothing is ever accomplished with apathy. Nothing is ever accomplished with ignorance. One of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel tunes, The Dangling Conversation, deals with apathetic relationships.

And you read your Emily Dickinson,

And I my Robert Frost,

And we note our place with bookmarkers

That measure what we've lost.

Like a poem poorly written

We are verses out of rhythm,

Couplets out of rhyme,

In syncopated time

Lost in the dangling conversation

And the superficial sighs,

Are the borders of our lives.

The song is about a disintegrating relationship. A couple is growing apart. They do things together, but it is shallow. Small talk and silent sighs and meaningless conversations frame their lives. The passion is gone, bookmarked somewhere in the past.

The song also applies to society. People turn off what is going on around them. We live in an age where ego-centrism is the rule. It’s all about “me”. There is very little passion for anything anymore. I was watching a concert on Palladia the other day…filled with people screaming at the top of their lungs for a performer I knew nothing about, and who really didn’t do a whole hell of a lot but prance around stage dressed in a tutu. How do you have passion for that?

Cell phones were in the air snapping pictures. Cell phones were in the audience ears as they talked to who knows whom about God knows what over noise that would prevent much conversation about anything. People have ceased interacting with anybody outside of their digital world. People have lost the ability to participate in the most basic civil discourse. More than a few can’t even say hello.

Society is out of sync. We are out of rhyme. The poem is poorly written. Lives are disaffected. People today are condemned to going through the motions. Celebrity trumps accomplishment. Achievement is worthless. There are no values. There are no standards to measure much of anything. Society is growing farther apart. Relationships are superficial. Our lives are bordered by ignorance and apathy. Nobody cares.

There has to be something better. For those of us who are children of the 1960’s, the bookmarker comes with us. We didn’t bookmark our passion with a placeholder in the past. It has come with us through life and is with us today.

Society needs to have a serious conversation, not a dangling conversation. Where do we go from here? How is our children’s future to be defined? What is important in life? What is the future of our country? How do we protect our freedoms? How does society best serve those living in it?

These are serious questions. But no one wants to talk. What we are left with is the Sound of Silence….people talking without speaking; people hearing without listening...writing songs that voices never share...no one dared to disturb the sounds of silence.