The night sets softly
With The hush of falling leaves, Casting shivering shadows
On the House Through the Trees,
And the light from a street lamp Paints
pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Golden child's Uneven scrawl
[...]
Text troubling, almost disturbing, to Paul Simon , referring to the little control we can have on the course of our lives. It is not a simplistic or fatalistic the "destiny", but "ingredients" of who we are and the context in which we operate. Paul Simon compares the path we are following the labyrinth in which one puts the rats (for the study of learning, memory, and packaging). Our desires, our fears, our reactions are predictable and, if we happen to correct our behavior is, as the laboratory rat, by "negative conditioning", where the same error has several times faced the same penalty. Free choices and we know are possible, of course, when for example, in restaurants, we have to choose between dessert and cheese ... but that does not go much further. Oscar Wilde said "I can resist everything except temptation ..." and virtue is sometimes only after a confrontation between fear and desire, where the former prevails or the latter fades. Often, the number and complexity of influences more or less contradictory pressures on us can go for the unexpected expression of freedom when it is only a "deterministic chaos". Some have come to be the goal achieved a form of serenity by repealing desires. Yet these are the main driver of our actions - the best and worst. Pursue happiness is to accept the possibility of suffering. Give up one for fear of others is a way to withdraw from life. Running in the labyrinth is not really the solution. What to do? There is no solution - a miracle ... but when the rat reaches the maze is that his memory allowed him to recognize the ways he has already traveled, and to prefer others to run towards new errors - and a way out.
Patterns
When nightfall
Without sound like a dead leaf
Casts Shadow scrapie
Large trees on my door
The light of a lamppost
Draw a diagram to the white wall
Like a puzzle mystery
Or the scribbles of a child
top of a staircase
In my little tiny room
I lie on my bed, and
At the twilight
On the white wall fits
What my eyes follows: The scheme
my life And the puzzle that I am
I must, as soon as I was born
Until the day I die On
this scheme
walk As I'm breathing
As the maze the rat
My way is before me And
not change the schema at the death of rat
In the shadow thickens
The diagram I have follow
Rest and rightly so
For in the shadows I live
Like the color of my skin
Or the day of my death
My life is made of diagrams
What I do not control
(Translation - Adaptation: Polyphrène)
PS: I have encountered great difficulties in translating this song. "Roadmap" is not the best translation of "Pattern" but apart from the constraints of rhyme, I preferred to avoid other terms (such as "Patron") whose connotations are different. The point here is "Roadmap" as a series of predetermined paths, and often repetitive.
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