Love and Cars

An English friend of mine likes songs about love and cars. It’s one of the reasons why he adores Bruce Springsteen, who sings of love and cars most eloquently. He doesn’t own a flash car himself, but clearly identifies with lyrics about moving on down the highway and desert spaces, and weird motels one might find oneself in while trying to get to Tulsa for pressing personal reasons. He knows these wild yearnings even though he commutes in the Home Counties.

I myself particularly like the song ‘Summer Breeze’, so floaty and uplifting. It takes me right back to the weekend afternoon when I first heard it many years ago. I was in London and sitting, rather improbably it seemed, in an acquaintance’s roof garden. I was also in love. The relationship ended in the emotional equivalent of arriving in Tulsa only to find it deserted…but the song doesn’t know that. Tulsa doesn’t feature. It’s about warm breezes making you feel fine and being carefree, and the scent of jasmine. It’s about love too but it’s also about summer, which only goes for a while and then comes back.

Songs are shortcuts to memory. When we hear them old feelings return, undiminished. We need them to help us remember, and they can also provide solace for what didn’t happen…not yet anyway. Love and cars, yes each can take us to distant and sometimes very strange places. But in life’s varied soundtrack, certain chords always reach the heart in the same way.

Love this:

‘Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Pixabay photograph (by Joe)