Song of the Week: “Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)” from Laura Marling

“Goodbye England”, released on Marling’s 2010 album I Speak Because I Can,  is driven by the same twanging guitar, filled by the same willowy voice and defined by the same piquant lyrics that we’ve discussed previously. It, and everything else she has released, are well-worth the listen for anyone who loves getting lost in rhythmic folk music or who enjoys pondering soul-searching, meaning-seeking lyrics.

I write this while looking through a window onto a snow-covered yard, and I await the arrival of another storm within the next 24 hours.

But that really has nothing to do with this song nor does it have anything to do with this post. This song has a fantastically succinct and philosophical line.

I’ve always been upset with how existential and then post-modern thought progressed. About 120 years ago Nietzsche argued that the knife which had the power to kill God, the sponge with the power to wipe away the horizon and remold the universe was in human hands. Decades later Camus began a book with the assertion that, in the face of the meaninglessness of the universe, the greatest question a man could ask of himself was of suicide. Then postmodern academics came to consensus that, as new technologies and discoveries became more frequent, meanings and value systems existed not in reality but in the reacting, panicked consciousness of the individual.

But nothing has changed, really, since then. Even the thinkers who advanced these ideas proposed no call to action. Even they could not bring themselves to declare that a dramatic shift in human beliefs or human behavior was necessary. Albert Camus, for example, discusses the Greek figure of Sisyphus, doomed by the Gods to roll a boulder up and down a hill for all of eternity. Sisyphus is not advised to revolt. He is not encouraged to strike out against the Gods and disregard their orders. He is not even told to leave is stone. Instead Camus writes that Sisyphus should stay with his stone and suffer, and spend his life twisting his mind and his perception until he finds some joy, some solace in his punishment.

Maybe people are different; society is, at least superficially. But we, as a human race, still cling to mostly the same ideals, the same emotions, the same values that were common for most of human history. These are the ideas that brought us greatness and love and satisfaction and joy but they also carry death, war and conflict along with them.

So we still have greatness and love. So we still have destruction and war. And we could leave everything behind and set out to create a new society, with new ideals and new behaviors, one that may be compatible with a Utopia. We would leave behind love, but we could also leave behind poverty and war.

But we won’t.

We won’t because most of us believe in the triumph of love over hatred, good over evil. They think that our current value systems, the ones that have been embedded in human society for thousands of years, will win out.

And those of us that don’t truly believe strive to believe anyway. And they do so out of fear.