My fellow Americans, good evening,
I was asked whether crying is a sign of weakness or of strength; I decided, the frank thing is that crying is a sign of weakness, even if only in a narrowly interpreted sense. Crying is, essentially, a universal admission of human imperfection, a reminder that even we can be overpowered from time to time, without exception; perhaps, at times, it may be seen as a sign of strength, the strength the admit our own faults and weaknesses. To call upon the wise words of one Dan Tardi, “there’s no such thing as too much man to cry.”
To paraphrase a crew of lyricists and occasional would-be philosophers who named themselves for the old Revolutionary city from which they come*, some things are simply just a little more than a feeling; that is to say, some things are just too much for us to handle, they overpower us. Ron Swanson, the great American, once dispensed the sage wisdom that crying is only acceptable at “funerals and the Grand Canyon;” or, more broadly, at moments of great sadness and pain, or at sites of immaculate beauty.
For all of us, it’s a little something different, but we certainly all have something, whether we know it yet or not, that our emotions cannot express in words, rather only in sobbing and awkward face scrunching. For our mid-70s hair band friends, perhaps those things might be that young woman Marianne, who walked away, or that old song that they used to play, before it all slipped away.
Thank you very much, good night, good luck, and God bless the United States.
(video)
*(the "crew of lyricists" mentioned is, of course, Boston; the song is none other than "More Than A Feeling.")
No comments:
Post a Comment