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.

The Alarming Rise of Suicide in America, Plus One More Thing to Think About

"He was a most peculiar man
That's what Mrs. Reardon says, and she should know
She lived upstairs from him..."
--A Most Peculiar Man, Simon & Garfunkel

Painting by the author.

A Wall Street Journal story about U.S. suicides caught my attention last month. It made me think about a blog post I'd written about Golden Gate Bridge suicide-attempt survivors. Tonight, while listening to The Essential Simon & Garfunkel (CD) I noted two songs on suicide, "A Most Peculiar Man" and "Richard Cory." 

I'm certain that one of the reasons Paul Simon's songs connected with so many young people in the Sixties was the angst he was able to capture in songs like Sounds of Silence, I Am A Rock, The Boxer. It was a post-JFK world during a war we didn't understand. We were coming of age and looking for America, but with our innocence somewhat stripped away.

The WSJ story by Julie Wernau was titled U.S. Suicides Reached a Record High Last Year, subtitled Older men are at highest risk, while suicide rates among young people have declined. 

One feature of the story was how Wernau tied the suicide data to a mental health crisis. She followed this by stating that nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. lost their lives to suicide in 2022. That's a pretty alarming figure, the highest since 1941 and a pretty grim milestone.

The Wernau article brought to mind a blog post I'd written a couple years ago on Medium about a stat that you don't often read about. It had to do with suicide attempts made by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The stat that struck me was not the quantity of people who have leapt to their death from that bridge, nearly one every 16 days, but rather it was this: all 29 people who survived their suicide attempts off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge said they regretted their decision as soon as they jumped.

That’s a mind-blowing statement. Each and every one who survived was immediately regretting their decision to leap to their deaths.

In my post I referenced an article titled The Jumpers, by Steve Taylor, Ph.D. The Jumpers opens by introducing us to a Ken Baldwin who had struggled with depression much of his life. Taylor shared details of what brought him to this point, then segues into several details about suicides on the Golden Gate.

From the beginning there have been 20 suicides a year at the bridge, he wrote. He went on to say, “Every jumper has a 98% chance of success, a much higher percentage than for hanging, drug overdose, or shooting. The bridge is 225 feet high, and after a four second fall, jumpers hit the water at a speed of 75 mph, with a force equivalent to a lorry crashing into a wall.”

The moment Ken Baldwin let go of the railing he immediately thought, “What am I doing? This was the worst thing I could do in my life.” He instantly thought of his wife and daughter and didn’t want to die.

He recalled realizing that everything he thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.

* * * 

A second article Google found for me had a slightly different angle. Instead of being about people who survived after attempting to jump to their deaths, this one was about people who intended to jump but were stopped by police.

This article, by Stacey Freedenthal, Ph.D., LCSW., was titled Where Are They Now?: The Fate of Suicide Attempt Survivors. What Dr. Freedenthal found was that of 515 persons who intended to jump from the bridge and were stopped, only 7% went on to actually kill themselves at some point later in life. It was "a remarkable testament to the fact that a suicidal crisis is often — very often — temporary.”

One of the reasons I find this topic important is because it dovetails with another issue that I am concerned about, the legalization of physician-assisted dying. (Often referred to as doctor-assisted suicide.) I have written about this topic a number of times since the early 90s after doing a series of articles for a seniors publication on ethical issues in terminal health care.

The editor who handed me the assignment stated that I had to write four articles as a journalist before writing the fifth in which I could lay out my own conclusions. I found it to be a remarkably rewarding experience as I interviewed ethicists, oncologists, nurses and proponents (a member of the Hemlock Society, for example.)

The final article in the series was titled The Pros and Cons of Physician Assisted Suicide. In that article I began by noting the four reasons it seemed logical to legalize assisted dying. (Mercy argument, patient’s right to self-determination, economics and the reality that people are already doing it.)

But in my readings and in online forums, I discovered a range of concerns and red flags that ought to be considered. One of these red flags was this:

Many, if not most, people have wished they could die rather than face some difficult circumstance in their lives. Doctors who are given authority to grant this wish may not always recognize that the real problem is a treatable depression rather than the need to fulfill a patient’s death wish.

In a General Debate Forum on America Online someone shared this perspective:

“I know many individuals with significant disabilities: quadriplegia, post-polio survivors, persons with MS, etc. A number of them have tried committing suicide in the past and are now thankful that a mechanism wasn’t in place that would have assured their death, because they got over whatever was bothering them at the time and are happy with life again.”

As I read the stories of people who attempted to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. I could not help but connect it again to this argument against legalization of assisted suicide.

Currently there is a lot of money being invested in legalization. I would urge caution.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Related Link
The Bodyguard and Richard Cory

Bridge Over Troubled Water: Interpretations of a Classic

It's easy to see why people keep going back to the music of the Sixties. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" is another of the classics from that time, by Simon & Garfunkel. According to Wikipedia the song features lead vocals by Art Garfunkel and a piano accompaniment influenced by gospel music with a "Wall of Sound"-style production. 

The song received five Grammy Awards (I didn't know one song could win that many, but one of them was for being part of the Grammy-winning album of the year by the same name.)

The instrumentation was produced by L.A.'s famous session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew.  The vocals were recorded in New York.

Inspirations for the song came from some interesting places. The concept of the bridge over deep waters was taken from Claude Jeter's 1959 song "Mary Don't You Weep." Another portion of the melody was drawn from the classic hymn "O Sacred Head Now Wounded." It's no wonder that the song can find a home in both secular settings and religious ones.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Paul Simon compared the instrumentation here with the Beatles' "Let It Be." I find it interesting that both albums took their name from these two songs, and also that for each group it was their last studio album before their breakups.

While listening to some Roy Orbison songs on YouTube last night I was quite moved by the song's power in this great vocalist's hands. Which led  me to check out some other artist's renditions. Wow! What a great song. Roy, Elvis and Whitney each knock it out of the park. (Forgive me the cliche metaphor, but Paul Simon likes to wear a baseball cap, so please excuse me.) Make time to enjoy these if you can.

Roy Orbison

Elvis gives it his all.

     

Whitney Houston and CeCe Winans... feel the power.

        

And Art, at the Concert in Central Park

For a big finish, here's one more.
Art and Paul at Madison Square Garden.

Art Garfunkel and Bridge Over Troubled Water

There's a scene in the film Impromptu in which George Sand says something to this effect: "When Chopin plays, it's proof that there is a God." She is speaking of the exquisite beauty with which he plays, the pure, unfettered beauty of his music. Whether literal or figurative, the statement is an effort to categorize the the feeling it generates. This is how I feel about Art Garfunkel. His voice carries such an evocative purity, tinged with melancholy, elevating listeners to some transcendent place.

Art Garfunkel met Paul Simon in sixth grade in an elementary school graduation play. But he'd been singing since first grade and his gifts were well on their way to being honed at an early age. When he was 15 he and Paul Simon began performing together as Tom & Jerry. They themselves idolized The Everly Brothers because of their intertwined harmonies. Like a lot of youth who were swept up in the music of their lives, they performed at high school dances and even recorded some songs. Each went off to college but they continued to perform together.

When we think of Simon & Garfunkel we don't picture them as anything other than musicians, but in college Garfunkel was a member of the tennis team, did fencing, skiing and bowling. After an art history degree he went on to get his masters in mathematics which he received in 1967. Paul Simon's initial studies were directed toward a degree in law.

But their natural gifts won out. Paul Simon was a gifted poet who would go on to write so many great songs that reflected the angst our youth was experiencing in the Sixties. "Save the Life of My Child," "The Boxer," "Only Living Boy In New York," "Sounds of Silence," "I Am A Rock"... songs that spoke of alienation and longing for hope.

"Bridge Over Troubled Water," which Paul wrote for Art to sing solo, became their biggest hit as a duo, hitting number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks straight, also topping the charts in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and New Zealand. It eventually sold over six million copies worldwide. Wikipedia notes that it became one of the most performed songs of the twentieth century, with over 50 artists, among them Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, covering the song.

Troubled waters speak of impassable rivers, places in life where we're thwarted, isolated. The turbulence is frightening. But we're not alone. Someone has noticed our sorrows, is reaching out... It's the voice of an angel.

It's Art's voice that elevates these simple images, making the song soar. And soar it does. Like a bird.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

When you're weary, feeling small
When tears are in your eyes I will dry them all
I'm on your site, oh, When times get rough
And friends just can't be found

Like a bridge over troubled water,
I will lay me down,
Oh, like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

When you're down and out, when you're on the streets
When evening falls so hard, I will comfort you
I'll take your part when the darkness falls and pain is all around

Yes, like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Oh, like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

Sail on, silver girl, sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine
Oh, if you need a friend,
I'm sailing right behind

Yes, like a bridge over troubled water
I, I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will easy your mind

The sheer beauty of the song is therapeutic.

His work with Paul Simon put him on the map, but his career didn't end with their breakup. In addition to numerous singles and albums he earned six Grammy's, including the Lifetime Achievement Award.

EdNote: Art Garfunkel was born in 1941, same year as Bob Dylan. Both will be 75 this year, Bob in May and Art in November. One of my favorite Art Garfunkel albums from his solo career is Up 'Til Now. I for one am grateful he chose to pursue a singing career instead of tennis.