The Dangling Conversation

This is the saddest song. It isn't one of those songs that you listen to one time and grasp the full meaning of, but the I don't believe that any Paul Simon song is like that. It is the ghostly rememberance of love that hangs on far too long after it is gone.

It's a still life water color,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room.
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
The borders of our lives.

 The imagery in this song is so beautiful and pathetically sad. Like using first the idea that their lives are still and then their lives are like water color - water color being faint and at the slightest bit of rain (rain and water in his songs are often meaning loss and depression. See: Kathy's Song) just completely wipes everything out. He even goes on to compare them to shells on the beach, either in the threat of being "washed out" or continutally washed out depending upon their location.

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
And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

 OK, this may be stretching just a tad, but he's reading "The Road less Traveled" with it's optimistic undertones and the girl is reading "I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died." These two people are just as he says out of "it". They are over and so wrong for eachother that it screams out in everything they say and do, and by saying it borders their lives, he invests that they are beyond trapped, but cornered in on all sides.

Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.

 It says that they are nothing but superficial, but then her refers to her as a shadow, which leads me to believe that it's just that she's gone and not that she was never there. He doesn't feel anything anymore, yet he's still trying. He's still reaching out and trying to grab her hand and kiss her, but it is just that there isn't anything there for him. He calls her a stranger "now," as opposed to always. It's the end of something that was very important to him (and it seems her too) and their having difficultly allowing eachother to go.

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