Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, With Insight Into Contemporary Thought Processes)

“All lies and jest

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest.”— “The Boxer,” written by American singer-songwriter Paul Simon, released by Simon and Art Garfunkel on their Bridge over Troubled Water LP (1970)

Happy birthday to Paul Simon, born 80 years ago today in Newark, NJ.

Some years ago, a late, dear friend of mine described Bob Dylan as the master poet of his generation and Simon as the master psychologist. There was more than a bit of the poet in Simon, too, but time has borne out that the Grammy-winning musician is indeed an explorer of the soul in all its rootlessness and alienation.

From “The Sound of Silence,” his first big hit with Art Garfunkel, through “American Tune,” the wistful elegy he created in the Watergate era, Simon—for all his concern about the nation’s politics—has largely preferred to comment obliquely on what’s roiling the country through meditations on what lies beneath rather than explicit protests.

Even “The Boxer,” which he admits to writing in a period of frustration over harsh criticism of his songwriting (the pugilist’s departure from the ring paralleled his half-hearted wish to exit the music scene), has come to take on a different cast. The title character “disregards” the warnings of others away from his change of life and embrace of a violent occupation, in favor of what he prefers: the “lies and jest.”

It’s not a bad forecast of what contemporary politics has become: groups refusing to listen to others, putting aside history and wiser counsels for more seductive siren calls, leaving them none the better for the experience.

Quote of the Day (Stephen Marche, on the ‘Beauty of Facebook’)

“The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.”— Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, The Atlantic, May 2012

Quote of the Day (William Barrett, on the Decline of Religion)

“Religion to medieval man was not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual's life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual. The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit.”—William Barrett, Irrational Man (1958)

(Late in life, philosopher-critic William Barrett (1913-1992) wrote The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals, a memoir containing vivid portraits of mid-century figures such as Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Dwight Macdonald, and Delmore Schwartz. He landed on the literary map, however in 1958 with Irrational Man, in which he explained the origins and meaning of existentialism to a primarily American audience.

I came upon a chapter from the latter book on “The Decline of Religion” in a cheap paperback I picked up called Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society, a 1962 anthology edited by Eric and Mary Josephson. I remember reading somewhere that Barrett was a lapsed Catholic; nevertheless, in describing how Protestantism had “fitted in very well” with the scientific movement that brought an end to the Middle Ages, you can almost sense a kind of wistfulness over a world empty of symbols and images—the kind of essay you might expect from the same decade in which David Riesman’s sociological grappling with meaninglessness in modern America, The Lonely Crowd, had appeared.)