When I was in my last year of high school, in 1965, I had been profoundly solitary for the past seven
years. I went to school every day and spoke with students and teachers who spoke to me, but for a
long time I'd been determined to avoid anything that even resembled friendship. And I'd never been on
a date. As Dickens said of one of his characters, I was as solitary as a clam.
Music changed that. When I heard the Beatles' songs Yesterday and Hide Your Love Away, they
caught my attention. When I heard Simon and Garfunkel sing "the people bowed and prayed to the
neon god they made", I had to come to the door of my shell to find out what was going on.
There was a magic mood in the air – 'normal' people were taking an interest in everything, even in a
shy solitary boy who had been avoiding them for years. A girl in another class tried to catch my
attention whenever we passed in the hall. She was on the swimming team, along with a young man in
my class who I'd begun to talk to. She got him to badger me until I came out one afternoon to watch
them practice. I only went in hope they would leave me alone afterward. I suppose they knew that once
I'd seen her in that blue bathing suit I wouldn't be able to return to my shell. I would have one date with
her, the only date I would have in high school
But that was the beginning of years of struggle to understand the social world, or at least function in it.
Paradoxically, I suppose as a backlash to my many social failures, it may also have been the source
of a winter spent hitchhiking alone through Europe, plus two winters in Mexico and Guatemala. But it
would finally take me also into the insurance world, accident investigation, marriage and children.
Yes, Simon and Garfunkel were instrumental to all that. I fell in love with their songs, but there was one I
was ambivalent about - I Am a Rock.
If you don't know that one, it begins with a young man (or a young woman) looking out the window of
his apartment onto snow covered streets below, comforting himself in his detachment from the people
there. His is the voice of an introvert at least, maybe someone autistic, certainly a loner. He says of
himself, "I am a rock, I am an island". But although he values his aloneness, it is made clear, through
his tone of voice and choice of words, that Simon and Garfunkel are mocking this detachment, as if
it's nothing but a cowardly artifice separating him from the real world. Then comes:
I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain,
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
These lines felt like a betrayal to me. I had never disdained friendship. I envied its laughter and its
loving. I didn't envy the parasitic use and abuse of one another that you sometimes saw. But I was
convinced by then that friendship was simply not open to me. You need a social instinct for friendship,
and that was clearly missing. But look at what else he says:
I have my books and my poetry to protect me,
Pardon me, but what's wrong with that? Books and poetry are not a wall we use to hide behind from
the world. They're part of the world. They've protected me all my life. If you're shy and solitary, and
trying to cope with the non-solitary, over-populated, insensitive, manic, aggressive modern world,
believe me, you need some protection. Don't leave that shell behind either.
At one point he admits that he has been in love, and says if that hadn't happened he never would have
cried. No mention is made of the likelihood that, through no fault of his own, he'd suffered a bad love
experience. That's what often happens when shy solitary people try to connect with social people - bad
connections, with painful consequences. But no, they portray this view of himself as an island as just
escapism, running away from reality. There is no recognition at all that he might be an introvert, or
autistic, in which case he is simply being true to himself in the only way he knows. Anyway, the young
man in the window finally declares:
A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.
Well human islands cry, we shy ones all know that, yet it seems that the non-shy think we're confused
about it. They've put words in his mouth again that don't belong there. Just because we don't flaunt our
pain in the face of the world, doesn't mean it isn't there.
Yes, it was a disappointment to find that Simon and Garfunkel were not sympathetic to my kind. But I
forgave them. How could I do anything but forgive them when they produced songs like The Sound of
Silence, Mrs Robinson, or The Boxer?, three of the finest pieces of highway music ever written.
Those songs have accompanied me throughout my life, especially on long night journeys.
The young man you see in the March 1968 photograph above (an identity photo taken in the office of
the International Nickel Company so he could work in one of their mines) carried I Am a Rock within
himself as a kind of personal anthem for years, despite its intended meaning. If he looks a bit haunted,
that's only because he had just returned, his money gone, from a winter wandering through the
mountainous green country in southern Mexico and Guatemala, and he'd only recently gazed into a
pair of dark beautiful eyes that, although he would soon return to Mexico looking for them, he was
never going to see again.
But in Mexico, where he'd begun to learn Spanish, he'd also begun to learn that this problem of
shyness and solitude was seen differently.
He read Spanish literature, stories like Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the
novel of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez which presents us with one solitary character after another . In my
novel The Birdcatcher I've already written about that book and others with similar themes.
But nowhere in that culture is there a finer recognition of shyness and the solitary mind than in the
1973 song Soledad. A young man himself in 1973, its author Emilio Jose won a contest in Spain with
it that year. The word 'soledad' translates into English as 'solitude' or 'aloneness' – it is both of those,
but in Spanish it has something deeper and richer in it, and it's used more frequently in Spanish
writing. The translation of the excerpts here is mine.
The song begins with the singer declaring that his, or her, 'soledad' is like a delicate 'amapola'
(poppy) 'en el trigo sola' (alone in a field of wheat), 'sin necesitar a nadie' (needing no one). It is a:
criatura primarosa que no sabe que es hermosa
ni sabe de amor ni enganos
Those linesl lift my spirit whenever I hear them – it is 'an exquisite creature that doesn't know that it is
beautiful, nor does it know anything of love or its deceptions'. The singer declares 'yo la quiero asi
distinta' (I want it just that way),
porque es sincera
es natural como el agua que lleva
corriendo alegre desde el manantial,
no sabiendo a donde va
que feliz vive mi Soledad
'Because it is genuine and natural like the clear water that rises happily up from the spring, not
knowing where it is going, oh how happy lives my Soledad'.
This is not just an acceptance of shyness and solitary behavior - it is a celebration of them. When I
heard Nana Mouskouri's recording of that song, it entered my life like that happy spring, and it has
never left. She made it famous in Europe, though it got a cooler reception in North America. She has
also recorded a French version.
Yes, the young man in the photograph had already begun to learn these things. He'd already begun to
write the first Alan Conrad stories too, and though those stories would be rejected by publishers, as
would everything else he would write over the next thirty years, he would never lose faith in them. His
experiences in Mexico, combined with the literature and songs of Spanish culture, were the only
antidote he needed to counter the strange pressure in our culture to have everyone write in the same
vein, with the same shared set of values. He knew already that he was an island, and he knew that his
island would have to be an island of rock if it was not going to be eroded by the sea of North American
culture that, despite its professions to the contrary, wants everyone to think alike.
No, in North America you're not supposed to sing of the beauty of solitude and aloneness, nor its
ability to nourish the soul, but that doesn't mean that Soledad shouldn't be your song too.
________
years. I went to school every day and spoke with students and teachers who spoke to me, but for a
long time I'd been determined to avoid anything that even resembled friendship. And I'd never been on
a date. As Dickens said of one of his characters, I was as solitary as a clam.
Music changed that. When I heard the Beatles' songs Yesterday and Hide Your Love Away, they
caught my attention. When I heard Simon and Garfunkel sing "the people bowed and prayed to the
neon god they made", I had to come to the door of my shell to find out what was going on.
There was a magic mood in the air – 'normal' people were taking an interest in everything, even in a
shy solitary boy who had been avoiding them for years. A girl in another class tried to catch my
attention whenever we passed in the hall. She was on the swimming team, along with a young man in
my class who I'd begun to talk to. She got him to badger me until I came out one afternoon to watch
them practice. I only went in hope they would leave me alone afterward. I suppose they knew that once
I'd seen her in that blue bathing suit I wouldn't be able to return to my shell. I would have one date with
her, the only date I would have in high school
But that was the beginning of years of struggle to understand the social world, or at least function in it.
Paradoxically, I suppose as a backlash to my many social failures, it may also have been the source
of a winter spent hitchhiking alone through Europe, plus two winters in Mexico and Guatemala. But it
would finally take me also into the insurance world, accident investigation, marriage and children.
Yes, Simon and Garfunkel were instrumental to all that. I fell in love with their songs, but there was one I
was ambivalent about - I Am a Rock.
If you don't know that one, it begins with a young man (or a young woman) looking out the window of
his apartment onto snow covered streets below, comforting himself in his detachment from the people
there. His is the voice of an introvert at least, maybe someone autistic, certainly a loner. He says of
himself, "I am a rock, I am an island". But although he values his aloneness, it is made clear, through
his tone of voice and choice of words, that Simon and Garfunkel are mocking this detachment, as if
it's nothing but a cowardly artifice separating him from the real world. Then comes:
I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain,
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
These lines felt like a betrayal to me. I had never disdained friendship. I envied its laughter and its
loving. I didn't envy the parasitic use and abuse of one another that you sometimes saw. But I was
convinced by then that friendship was simply not open to me. You need a social instinct for friendship,
and that was clearly missing. But look at what else he says:
I have my books and my poetry to protect me,
Pardon me, but what's wrong with that? Books and poetry are not a wall we use to hide behind from
the world. They're part of the world. They've protected me all my life. If you're shy and solitary, and
trying to cope with the non-solitary, over-populated, insensitive, manic, aggressive modern world,
believe me, you need some protection. Don't leave that shell behind either.
At one point he admits that he has been in love, and says if that hadn't happened he never would have
cried. No mention is made of the likelihood that, through no fault of his own, he'd suffered a bad love
experience. That's what often happens when shy solitary people try to connect with social people - bad
connections, with painful consequences. But no, they portray this view of himself as an island as just
escapism, running away from reality. There is no recognition at all that he might be an introvert, or
autistic, in which case he is simply being true to himself in the only way he knows. Anyway, the young
man in the window finally declares:
A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.
Well human islands cry, we shy ones all know that, yet it seems that the non-shy think we're confused
about it. They've put words in his mouth again that don't belong there. Just because we don't flaunt our
pain in the face of the world, doesn't mean it isn't there.
Yes, it was a disappointment to find that Simon and Garfunkel were not sympathetic to my kind. But I
forgave them. How could I do anything but forgive them when they produced songs like The Sound of
Silence, Mrs Robinson, or The Boxer?, three of the finest pieces of highway music ever written.
Those songs have accompanied me throughout my life, especially on long night journeys.
The young man you see in the March 1968 photograph above (an identity photo taken in the office of
the International Nickel Company so he could work in one of their mines) carried I Am a Rock within
himself as a kind of personal anthem for years, despite its intended meaning. If he looks a bit haunted,
that's only because he had just returned, his money gone, from a winter wandering through the
mountainous green country in southern Mexico and Guatemala, and he'd only recently gazed into a
pair of dark beautiful eyes that, although he would soon return to Mexico looking for them, he was
never going to see again.
But in Mexico, where he'd begun to learn Spanish, he'd also begun to learn that this problem of
shyness and solitude was seen differently.
He read Spanish literature, stories like Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the
novel of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez which presents us with one solitary character after another . In my
novel The Birdcatcher I've already written about that book and others with similar themes.
But nowhere in that culture is there a finer recognition of shyness and the solitary mind than in the
1973 song Soledad. A young man himself in 1973, its author Emilio Jose won a contest in Spain with
it that year. The word 'soledad' translates into English as 'solitude' or 'aloneness' – it is both of those,
but in Spanish it has something deeper and richer in it, and it's used more frequently in Spanish
writing. The translation of the excerpts here is mine.
The song begins with the singer declaring that his, or her, 'soledad' is like a delicate 'amapola'
(poppy) 'en el trigo sola' (alone in a field of wheat), 'sin necesitar a nadie' (needing no one). It is a:
criatura primarosa que no sabe que es hermosa
ni sabe de amor ni enganos
Those linesl lift my spirit whenever I hear them – it is 'an exquisite creature that doesn't know that it is
beautiful, nor does it know anything of love or its deceptions'. The singer declares 'yo la quiero asi
distinta' (I want it just that way),
porque es sincera
es natural como el agua que lleva
corriendo alegre desde el manantial,
no sabiendo a donde va
que feliz vive mi Soledad
'Because it is genuine and natural like the clear water that rises happily up from the spring, not
knowing where it is going, oh how happy lives my Soledad'.
This is not just an acceptance of shyness and solitary behavior - it is a celebration of them. When I
heard Nana Mouskouri's recording of that song, it entered my life like that happy spring, and it has
never left. She made it famous in Europe, though it got a cooler reception in North America. She has
also recorded a French version.
Yes, the young man in the photograph had already begun to learn these things. He'd already begun to
write the first Alan Conrad stories too, and though those stories would be rejected by publishers, as
would everything else he would write over the next thirty years, he would never lose faith in them. His
experiences in Mexico, combined with the literature and songs of Spanish culture, were the only
antidote he needed to counter the strange pressure in our culture to have everyone write in the same
vein, with the same shared set of values. He knew already that he was an island, and he knew that his
island would have to be an island of rock if it was not going to be eroded by the sea of North American
culture that, despite its professions to the contrary, wants everyone to think alike.
No, in North America you're not supposed to sing of the beauty of solitude and aloneness, nor its
ability to nourish the soul, but that doesn't mean that Soledad shouldn't be your song too.
________
I Am A Rock vs Soledad
Copyright 2009 - Alan Conrad
PDF Version
Copyright 2009 - Alan Conrad
PDF Version