For the past few days I’ve had the song, “The Man Who Sold The World” stuck in my head. Every morning when I wake up, I can hear the opening notes in my mind. This is uncanny, as I haven’t even heard that song since I was a tweenaged kid. I think I was eleven or twelve. When a song pops into my head like that “out of the blue”, I find that it usually has some deeper significance. The part of me that feels things deeply refuses to speak in prose. It will only sing to me.
After the song nagged me every morning for a few days, I figured that it had to be important if my subconscious felt the need to sing the same song every day for a week. So I hopped out of bed this morning and looked up the lyrics. I was a little surprised that it was actually a David Bowie song, not Nirvana. Nirvana just did their own version. Both are good but Bowie’s is better. I looked up the meaning of the lyrics.
People speculate that it’s Bowie singing a duet with his younger self. The “Man Who Sold The World”, it is conjectured, is the young man that the singer used to be. Which is a little weird, given that he wrote the song at 19. Then again, I remember feeling like an old man in my early twenties. So, maybe they’re right.
At any rate, I’m not concerned with authorial intent here (Bowie himself is a little vague about it), but about what it meant for me. That being said, I think that Bowie conceived it of the time as speaking to his future self, whereas I feel that it’s about speaking to one’s past self.
We passed upon the stair
We spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there
He said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise
I spoke into his eyes
"I thought you died alone
A long, long time ago"
[Chorus]
Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world
I must have listened to the Bowie version two dozen times today, and the Nirvana version three or four. A big part of assessing your feelings about these things is letting the music sink into yourself. Something that has been harassing you in your mind will not go away until you stare into its eyes. So I listened to it over and over again.
Is there some part of me that is tapping me on the shoulder? Do I, perhaps, respond by saying, “I thought you died alone? A long, long time ago?”
When you’re young, you’ve got the whole world before you. Your whole life before you. You have no idea how things are going to turn out. The future is uncertain, but it’s a bright and optimistic uncertainty, one that looks more exciting than dreadful. The key here is possibility. What might the future hold? There seems to be a lot to look forward to.
It’s about innocence. When you’re young, you don’t know the world around you. You don’t know yourself, either. You’re willing to give people a chance, against your better judgment. And this grants you possibilities; because you don’t know who you are yet, you can become anyone. At least, it feels that way. And maybe the clay really is more malleable when it’s unseen… Everything feels wonderful because it’s being experienced for the first time. Your first love feels so intoxicating because it’s the first time you’ve experienced really loving someone. Your first job feels so difficult because it’s the first time you’ve really worked for something. Innocence makes every experience feel vast and meaningful. To a small child, a house with a tall ceiling feels like a cathedral, because the child is smaller; to a young man of 23, every new experience feels exotic and fascinating because he has not seen much.
(I hear a lot of older people say stuff like this: “When you’re young, you think you can do anything. But then you get older, and realize that too much time has passed. And now it’s all over.” This kind of talk always struck me as self-pitying and defeatist, as an attempt by older people to foist their fatalism on the younger. It ain’t over yet. I still got a pulse.)
I’m thirty-four. If the Biblical standard of three score and ten is correct, then I’m nearly halfway through life. This is one of those times when the Hindu worldview seems more fair: if there’s reincarnation, then at least I get another shot at all this. Who knows what happens when we pass the veil? I don’t. Nobody does. I suppose the most likely outcome is a sense of having always been here.
I look at my life. I basically wasted my twenties, so far as money is concerned, but I had some unique experiences. I’m making better money now. I’m not a famous writer or a philosopher professor, but being a software engineer isn’t too bad. Things could be a lot worse. Things were a lot worse five years ago. There’s a sadness there. But what is the sadness about?
It’s the loss of possibility. The loss of innocence. It’s the fact that you used to feel as if you had the whole world in the palm of your hand, and you gave it up for comfort, a nice conventional career, no more romance or awe.
You had the whole world in your hand, and you sold it.
What did you sell it for? I suppose it was a world of possibilities. And over time, you sold those possibilities, one by one, for actualities. You have ten paths. You choose one. The other paths dissolve into the air. Now you’ve got more branching paths, more possibilities, but they just don’t feel the same. There aren’t as many. And the ones that are there look a lot like all the ones you’ve seen before. You were once young. You were once vibrant. You once had so much energy you didn’t really need to sleep every night. You once dreamed impossible dreams, things that are silly or cringeworthy in retrospect, but which seemed so lovely at the time. But no more. You’ve sold the world.
But there’s another world dawning, isn’t there?