The Sound of Silence: The Songs We Never Sing

This morning I listened to "The Sound of Silence" and, for the first time in years, actually listened to it.

Paul Simon wrote it in 1964. A crowd bowing down to a neon god of its own making. A sign flashing a warning that nobody stops to read. People talking without speaking, hearing without listening.

Sixty years on, I can't think of a better description of how we live now. We carry the neon god in our pockets.

But it was a different line that stopped me this time. Somewhere in that crowd, Simon notices people writing songs that no voice ever shares.

I've been thinking about that all morning.

The song in the drawer

We all start out writing songs. Not literally, of course, but the dream of the business we'd build, the book we'd write, the place we'd live, the thing we'd finally say. At twenty, we hold these songs loudly and without embarrassment.

Then life gets busy. The mortgage arrives. The children arrive. The career takes a shape that pays the bills, and the song goes quietly into a drawer. No one decides to abandon it. There is simply always something more urgent, and a song that isn't sung today can wait until tomorrow. Then tomorrow becomes a habit.

The unsettling part is that nobody stops us. There is no dramatic moment when the dream is taken away. We give it up politely, in small instalments, and call it being realistic. In Simon's words, no one dares disturb the silence, and that includes us.

Where the prophets are writing

The song also says the words of the prophets are written on subway walls and tenement halls. I read that as a reminder that the answers are rarely hidden in some grand place. They're in the ordinary and the overlooked, the things we walk past every day.

For most of us, the prophet is the small nagging voice. It's the flicker of envy when we see someone doing what we once wanted to do. It's the sentence that begins "One day I'd like to..." and never finishes. We hear it and we keep walking, because the noise of the neon is louder.

What the silence costs

Age has a way of clarifying all this. The years may not dim the dream, but they do shorten the time we tell ourselves we have to act on it.

But there is always time to take the song out of the drawer.