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.

Father and I: Par Lagerkvist Adds Layers of Meaning to a Simple Sunday Stroll

"Father and I" is a story I've run across in at least a couple anthologies over the years. It's always a rewarding read, so I will share this as a companion piece to Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas, which I wrote about yesterday.

"Father and I" may be one of Lagerkvist's finest short works. It's masterfully simple. On the surface, almost nothing happens. A nine- or ten-year-old boy spends a Sunday afternoon walking through the countryside with his father, a railway worker. They listen to birds, smell the spring air, throw stones into a stream, and walk along the railroad tracks where the father greets passing engineers by name. The world is harmonious, ordered, and familiar.

When darkness falls. everything changes. As they head home the same woods become threatening. The stream that had murmured pleasantly now roars like an abyss. The telegraph poles no longer "sing" but seem to rumble ominously from deep within the earth. The boy's excitement over a glowworm goes unnoticed by his father, creating the first hint of emotional separation.

At the story's culmination  an unexpected black train rushes past in the darkness. The father, who has recognized every train and every engineer throughout the day, stops and says in surprise: "Strange, what train was that? And I didn't recognize the driver." Then they walked on in silence, though the boy's body was shaking and his mind now supercharged with anxious thoughts about the future.

The story elements are freighted with meaning. The father represents certainty, tradition, continuity, and a world in which everything has a place. He knows every track, every timetable, every engineer. He possesses an unquestioned faith that gives coherence to reality. But suddenly there is a train that belongs to another order entirely—a train hurtling through darkness toward a destination the father cannot imagine.

The boy realizes that this unknown train is, in a sense, his own future. He will one day be leaving the secure world of childhood and entering a modern existence filled with uncertainty, alienation, and questions his father cannot answer.

What strikes me most is how this story anticipates Barabbas. In both works Lagerkvist writes about human beings suspended between worlds. The father inhabits a world of inherited faith; the son enters a world of existential doubt. Sahak possesses certainty; Barabbas longs for it but cannot attain it. Both protagonists are haunted by something absent—a security, a faith, a meaning that seems just beyond reach.

Lagerkvist's gift is that he never argues these ideas philosophically. He lets a walk through the woods, the sound of telegraph poles, or a black train disappearing into the night carry the entire weight of the human condition. The boy's fear isn't simply fear of the dark. One day he will board his own train for destinations unknown.

* * *

Reading the story always brings to mind a number of my own personal experiences with trains. It also brings to mind a story by Mike Savage about a father and son,  and a train, The Lost Locomotive of the Battle-Axe.  A youth joins his father for his first deer hunt in the brutal sub-zero snow of the northern woods. Bundled in wool and facing biting cold, the boy trudges through deep powder as they track big bucks. Amid the stark beauty and hardship, he helps field-dress a kill, confronting blood, guts, and the raw realities of manhood. The “lost locomotive” metaphor captures the father’s powerful, steam-like presence and the boy’s emerging sense of maturity. It’s a concise, visceral coming-of-age tale about initiation, father-son bonding, and the chill of growing up.

I also think there is an autobiographical element that makes the story especially poignant. It feels like Lagerkvist looking back across decades to the precise moment he sensed that he was departing from the unquestioned Christianity of his childhood into the uncertainty that would characterize both his life and his writing. The father is loved and admired, but he cannot accompany the son on the journey ahead.

Both stories revolve around fathers, sons, trains and mysteries. 

Read Par Lagerkvist's story here: Father and I

Song of the Matrix: An AI Collaboration (Version 4.0)

On Monday I shared Extracts from a Writer's Notebook. On Tuesday I posted a short story generated by Grok, an LLM created by xAI titled Song of the Matrix: An AI Collaboration (Vignette Version). In this experiment there were two more iteration, culminating in an expanded version in which we meet a second character who becomes part of the story.  

My aim is to show how my handwritten notes from before the advent of social media and the AI era can blend with modern AI algorithms to create a genuine collaborative outcome.

The Song of the Matrix (Version 4.0)

He often felt as though his life were balanced on stilts made of splintered wood, with a mind whose feet teetered under the weight of a thousand rickety tensions. It wasn’t madness, exactly, but a constant pressure—too many rules, too many judgments, too many voices ringing through the corridors of memory.

This evening he ducked into The Power Café, a narrow place on the corner that had once been a tailor’s shop. Now it boasted a slogan in chalk script on the sandwich board outside: The Magic of Northern Italy. Inside, the reality was day-old biscotti and an espresso machine that hissed like an asthmatic.

Above the counter, a sun-faded poster drooped: Waisted Minds. A waist is a terrible thing to mind. Beneath it, graffiti scrawled by some anonymous wit demanded: Why are Texans so Austintatious?

He smiled grimly at the joke. It was just the sort of thing she would have laughed at.

He slid into a booth. Around him, voices hummed with the same desperate cadence. A sharp-suited man at the counter asked, too loudly, “If I’m so successful, why am I so lonely?” A pair of students argued over credit cards, one insisting, “I’m gonna max out my Monkey card,” as if that were rebellion. At another table a trio quoted advertising gurus like preachers citing scripture: The greatest sin in advertising is to be boring. “And the second greatest sin,” one added, “is not agreeing with Ogilvie.”

He pulled out his notebook. The pages were cluttered with fragments: The Four Atomic Sons of Madame Fauvre. Freestyle Frost Flicker—cleaning ice off windows. A single word: Opinionitis.

Yes, that was the sickness of the age. The inability to hear without judging. He remembered the P.I.N. Formula from de Bono—Positive, Interesting, Negative. But no one waited for the interesting anymore. Everyone lunged straight for the negative. To be effective, he thought, one must tame the value judgments, suspend the reflex to condemn. A mature mind listens first.

But who was listening?

He closed the notebook and left. Outside, the streetlamps flickered, frost spreading across their glass like silver lace. He whispered the only benediction he trusted: How to get blessed—be a blessing.

A voice startled him. “Talking to yourself, or to the universe?”

A young woman leaned against the lamppost, smoking. Her coat was too thin for the cold, her hair cut short in uneven lengths, as if she’d done it herself. She smiled wryly.

“Maybe both,” he said.

“Lucky universe,” she replied. “Most people don’t bother.”

They fell into step as he walked. She didn’t ask where he was going, and he didn’t offer. After a few blocks she said, “You look like a man who keeps notebooks. Am I right?”

He hesitated, then showed her the one in his pocket. She flipped it open, skimming the fragments. “‘A man who needs nothing can afford to risk everything.’ I like that.” She tapped the page. “But do you believe it?”

“Some days,” he said. “Other days I need everything and can risk nothing.”

She laughed—not unkindly. “That sounds about right. I once wrote: Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Then I realized I was quoting someone else, not myself. Isn’t that strange? How other people’s words get stuck in your blood?”

Her candor knocked the air from his lungs. He thought of her, the one he’d lost—a woman bound by rules like chains. He said nothing.

The girl must have noticed. “Sorry. I say things too bluntly. It’s a flaw.”

“No,” he murmured. “It’s… familiar.”

They walked in silence until they reached the river. The water was black, its surface rimmed with ice.

“You know,” she said, tossing her cigarette into the current, “the footprints we leave—half the time they’re not even ours. They’re for whoever comes next.”

He looked at her sharply. The echo of Aldrin’s words startled him, as if the universe had been listening after all.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She grinned. “Depends on the day. Tonight it’s Clara. Tomorrow it might be something else.”

“Clara,” he repeated, testing it. “Do you ever feel like you’re living inside a song? One you can’t quite hear but that keeps pulling you forward?”

She tilted her head. “All the time.”

He smiled for the first time in weeks. The Song of the Matrix was no longer a solitary hum. Someone else could hear it too.

And for the first time in months, he wasn’t just listening. He was accompanied.

# # # #

"The Song of the Matrix" is a collaborative work of fiction. 

Song of the Matrix: An AI Collaboration (Vignette Version)

Yesterday I shared a batch of Extracts from a Writer's Notebook. For the past couple years I've been experimenting with AI, or specifically Large Language Models (LLMs).  
>>EdNote: LLMs are a specific kind of AI trained on massive amounts of text data to generate and understand natural language. All LLMs are AI, but not all AI are LLMs. Or, to put it another way, all cocker spaniels are dogs, but not all dogs are cocker spaniels.<<

Anyways, I shared my writers notebook post in order to set up a couple follow-ups to show the degree to which LLMs have advanced. First, I fed my notebook extracts into Grok, an LLM created by xAI, and asked Grok to create a story using all these fragments. The result was something of a mashup that included everything but didn't flow as well as I might have liked. Next, after a few suggestions, the story was tightened and more satisfying. Here is the result, with a few minor edits.

The Song of the Matrix

He walked with a mind whose feet teetered under the weight of a thousand rickety tensions. Each step seemed borrowed from gravity, each thought a fragile splinter.

At dusk, he entered The Power Café. The place pretended at elegance—“The Magic of Northern Italy” promised on the chalkboard—but inside, the mood was thin. A slogan peeling from the wall declared: A waist is a terrible thing to mind. Below it, graffiti taunted: Why are Texans so Austintatious?

He sat alone. Around him, voices hummed with the same desperate cadence. One man declared, “If I’m so successful, why am I so lonely?” Another joked about maxing out his Monkey card. They laughed, but the laughter was brittle, stereotypes from pre-fabricated lexicons. The great battle for significance, he thought, is really just a battle against irrelevance.

On the table, he opened his notebook. He scrawled a title: The Four Atomic Sons of Madame Fauvre. Below it, a half-formed product idea: Freestyle Frost Flicker—something to clean the ice from windows. Then a single word: Opinionitis.

He lingered over it. The disease of the age, he mused: the inability to hear without judging, to think without condemning. He recalled the formula of Dr. de Bono—Positive, Interesting, Negative. If only people could suspend their judgments long enough to notice the interesting. A mature mind learns to wait, he thought.

Someone quoted David Ogilvie nearby—The greatest sin in advertising is to be boring. Another added, “The second greatest sin is not agreeing with Ogilvie.” They chuckled. He didn’t. He thought instead of creativity and courage, of content and form, of how a man who needs nothing can afford to risk everything.

His blood, it seemed, had turned to wine long ago, and it sang through his veins with nowhere to pour itself. He remembered Jimmy Johnson’s words to his team after the Super Bowl: This feeling of love that you share right now you will have the rest of your lives. He envied that permanence.

Instead, he carried the melancholy of all things done. Aldrin’s phrase had haunted him ever since the astronaut returned from the moon. The footprints we left were not ours but for all mankind. Yet his own footprints felt erased, unclaimed.

The thought of her surfaced. She had lived by inner rules so strict they bound her tighter than chains. In the end, she had chosen permanence over pain. Suicide, they said, was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But who was he to call her problems temporary?

He closed his notebook. Leaving the café and stepped into the night. The street lamps flickered, frost blooming on their glass. For a moment, he whispered a prayer, almost a vow: How to get blessed—be a blessing.

And then he walked on, the song of the Matrix still playing, a melody heard only by those willing to listen without judgment.

* * * * *

Tomorrow we will add a second character. 

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.

The Meaning of Life (An AI Collaboration in Second Person)

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

You sit at your desk, staring at the blank page in front of you. You've been tasked with writing an essay about the meaning of life, but you have no idea where to begin. You tap the desk with your pen, feeling a growing sense of frustration. 

Maybe you should go for a walk, you think. Perhaps the breeze will clear your head. Then again, you decide to sit and commit to staying in place till something strikes you. Sure enough, a black-capped chickadee flies into the room through the open window and strikes you on the side of the head.

No, that doesn't happen. But imagining that, you do decide to stand up to go see what the ruckus is outside. A small crowd has gathered on the sidewalk and a young red-faced man is screaming at what appears to be two older women, one of them wearing a light blue shawl. You watch to see what will happen next, but nothing comes of it and the crowd disperses. 

Suddenly, you hear a knock at the door. Turning, you find an old man standing in the doorway, a wise look in his glistening grey eyes. He introduces himself as a philosopher. 

"I've come to help you find the answer you seek," he says. His voice is hoarse and he's winded from climbing the flight of stairs to your apartment.

You invite him in, and he takes a seat across from you. When he begins to speak, his words are slow and measured. "The meaning of life is different for everyone," he says. "Some people find it in their work, others in their relationships or their hobbies."

As he talks, you begin to see the world in a new way. You realize that for you the meaning of life is not something you'll find in a book or lecture. It's something that you have to discover for yourself, through your own experiences and reflections.

The whole time he's talking, though, you are distracted by your own inner dialogue. Who is this guy? Why is he here? Why did I invite him in? It takes an effort but you manage to dismiss these thoughts and give him your full attention.

When he finishes speaking there is a long silence. You hear cars go by on the street but the whoosh of wind and the hum of tires and engines only produce a sensation of white noise as you ponder the moment. 

"Can I get you a drink? Juice? Coffee? Maybe a beer?"

The old man makes no reply. Shaking his head, he stands to leave. Before turning to go he looks you in the eye and delivers a piece of advice. "Always follow your heart. And never stop searching for the things that bring you joy and fulfillment."

"Thank you," you say as he disappears out the door.

When you sit down at your desk again, you feel a sense of clarity. You begin to write, the words flowing onto the page as you explore ideas the old man has sparked in your mind. 

By the time the sun sets you finish your essay. Sitting back and rereading your words gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment. You've discovered something meaningful, something that will stay with you for the rest of your life, a sense of purpose.

* * * * *

EdNote: Many of us have been reading about AI for years. From time to time I've experimented with this technology rather than simply reading articles about it. The skeleton of this story was generated by ChatGPT, which was trained by OpenAI. ChatGPT is the latest iteration of AI writing assistants and has generated a lot of buzz due to its power and ability to rapidly produce a lot of copy.

The prompt for this story was "Write a 400 word story in second person about the meaning of life." I chose to have the ChatGPT write a story in second person because the first three or four stories I asked it to write were all somewhat interesting but flat, more plot and little embellishment to give it life. I was thinking of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, which was a short novel written in second person. 

It's amazing how quickly the AI begins creating. After the briefest time words begin appearing almost instantly, whether an essay, poem or story. The second person story it generated was interesting, but relatively flat. I edited the story extensively to create the 560 word story you have just read. 

 * * * * *

Related Links
My 2016 review of Surviving AI by Calum Chace
A Visit with Futurist Calum Chace on His Book The Economic Singularity
Two Versions of The Comet, Light and Dark
Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun Is Another Stellar Achievement
Interview with David Asch Offer Insights On AI

I've also been collaborating with a pair of AI "art" bots. You can see some of the things "we" have created here on my Instagram page.

You Can't Erase the Past: The Words Has a Story to Tell

Hollywood seems to enjoy making films about writers and why shouldn't they? Every film begins with a screenplay and we, as writers, are perpetually told to write about what we know. 

Some of my fave writer flicks would include Midnight in Paris, The Ghostwriter, Adaptation, The Player,  The End of the Tour and Stranger Than Fiction. The Words is now on that list. It's about words, what they mean and what it means to claim them as your own when they are not. In other words, it's a story about plagiarism, though like all great stories it is much more than that. 

Bradley Cooper is a frustrated young writer who, like a half million of us, can't find a publisher for his novel. By some miracle, the love of his life finds a satchel when they are in Paris on their Honeymoon. It looks like "just the thing" for a writer. (I have received such things from my wife who is better at gifting than I.) Inside the satchel is an unpublished manuscript, that she was unaware of. When he reads it, he's blown away by the power of the prose. Because it has no "owner" he retypes and submits it, claiming these words as his own.

There are shades of Jack London's Martin Eden here, because once he is famous the publishing houses will publish anything that flows off his fingertips. But it's another story as well. How does one come clean after becoming famous via a lie? He approaches his agent to set the record straight, but then what?  

Dennis Quaid, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Irons are the lead characters who bring this story to life, but the writer who wrote the screenplay has to be acknowledged here. (Brian Klugman, Lee Sternthal) There are so many great lines. Here's some dialogue from the film that I found thought-provoking as the story built to its layered crescendo.

* * *

"His child was dying and there was nothing he could do."

* * * 

"I thought you should know the story behind the story."

* * * 

"We all make our choices in life, the hard thing to do is live with them."

* * * 

"You can't just make things right. Things are just things."

* * * 

"For all those years, I thought about her every day. Broken, because of what I did to her. Then all of a sudden there she was. She seemed happy. Well, if I was to tell you that realization didn't cause me pain I'd be lying, but in some ways it helped me to turn the corner, to pick up again without looking back all the time."

* * * 

"I've done all I can the best that I can. That's all you can ask of a person."

* * *

"My tragedy is that I loved words more than I loved the woman who inspired me to write." 

* * *

"We all make choices in life. The hard thing is to live with them."  

* * *

"What do you really want?"

* * *

This is what it comes down to for any of us. What do you really want?