[BRIEF NOTE] The Little Things

[rfmcdonald]

I'm back in MacDonald-Corrie, taking a break from checking papers. This batch continues to be good, although for some odd reason people are violating the standards of MLA by using footnotes. (It's not history, people. It's also not philosophy, I think.)

I've been listening, as I said in a previous post, to Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice" single. For some reason, it's become a favourite of mine. Ono's lyrics strike me as extraordinarily sensitive, as being particularly careful with the little things, with private intimacies set against a grandly impersonal background.

Walking on thin ice
I'm paying the price
For throwing the dice in the air
Why must we learn it the hard way
And play the game of life with your heart
I gave you my knife
You gave me my life
Like a gush of wind in my hair
Why do we forget what's been said
And play the game of life with our hearts
I may cry some day
But the tears will dry whichever way
And when our hearts return to ashes
It'll be just a story
It'll be just a story
"I knew a girl
Who tried to walk across the lake
'Course it was winter and all this was ice
That's a hell of a thing to do, you know
They say this lake is as big as the Ocean
I wonder if she knew about it?"

Elvis Costello appears to have done a cover version just slightly different from the original, at least lyrically. He's another artist I really have to check out, since those songs of his that I've seen on Muchmusic in videos have struck me as paying a similarly close attention to detail. For that matter, I have to check out Yoko Ono--the Beatles hardly would have stayed together if she didn't appear, and she's clearly an artist and musician of note.

The little things do, indeed, matter, and do have effects beyond their relatively small size. Witness this song's existence.