Looking for America: Paul Simon's Quiet Masterpiece of Longing

Inside the World Trade Center

Last week I listened to Paul Simon's "America" for the first time in a while. How interesting to hear it in conjunction with our nation's 250th anniversary. The song's deceptively simple narrative unfolds into profound reflection on the human condition.

In the 1960s Simon & Garfunkel recorded numerous songs that captured the angst of "my generation." Haunting songs like "Sounds of Silence" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" connected with young people living through that period of disruptions that included assassinations, race riots, burning cities, the Cold War and Vietnam. 

The song is essentially a short story. It begins with the playful, "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together / I've got some real estate here in my bag." The "real estate" is nothing more than what's in his suitcase or sleeping bag. They're young, broke, and full of possibility. After purchasing a pack of smokes and Mrs. Wagner pies they simply "walk off to look for America." Optimistic Sixties youth. 

In the second stanza we learn that the narrator's girl friend is Kathy as they board a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, something I myself have done twice in my life, both being personal turning points. Perhaps that's one reason this song has stayed with me. Certain songs attach themselves to the intersections of our lives and are never heard the same way again.

"Kathy", I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Their banter on the bus is lighthearted. Who hasn't had these moments with someone you enjoyed being with, playing games with the faces.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

Like children cloud-gazing, they entertain themselves by transforming ordinary life into adventure. After a while, though, the mood begins to change. I can imagine it as a movie soundtrack in which the first notes of a gloomier tune can be heard. 

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"

"We smoked the last one an hour ago"

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

 

I've been in all these scenes before, night settling in, moving through time looking at scenery and retreating into the thoughts in my head, and she retreating into her magazine. This line says so much with such brevity: "So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine..." No external drama here as the song shifts to a darker place.  

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all come to look for America

It's a heartbreaking confession. "Kathy, I'm lost. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

And perhaps the saddest part is how this kind of awareness, when it goes unshared, isolates us. We can sit beside someone we love, traveling the same road, and still find ourselves alone inside our own thoughts.

Simon avoids giving an answer as to why the narrator feels this way. Beneath the surface, he feels something he doesn't fully understand, an angst that is existential, not circumstantial. And the kicker, which is repeated at the end, is that this is something pervasive. While counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike he imagines that they are all in the same soup, lost but looking, yearning for something.

Thus, America is not a geographical destination but something much larger, an idea—a symbol of fulfillment, belonging, identity, perhaps even purpose itself. We're all searchers, seekers of a place where we belong, people striving to understand why we are here and what it means to be human.

Here we are, nearly sixty years later, with more technology, more entertainment, and more information than Simon's two travelers could have imagined. Yet the longing he captured has not disappeared.

Perhaps that's why America has endured. It's not really a song about highways or Greyhound buses or even the United States. It's about that quiet ache almost everyone experiences sooner or later—the feeling that there must be something more. Simon never tells us whether Kathy and her companion found what they were looking for. He simply reminds us that we are all fellow travelers, counting the cars on our own New Jersey Turnpikes, looking for a place to call home.