There's a song by Stephen Stills, Richard Curtis, and Michael Curtis titled "Southern Cross" that weaves a magic spell for me whenever I hear it. Maybe it's the combination of naval technical vocabulary (... sailing a reach before a following sea ... making for the trades on the outside ... off the wind on this heading ... eighty feet of waterline ...), plus a good tune, plus a love story/quest, plus some optimistic philosophy, as expressed for example in the title verses:

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small,
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a comin' day.

Or maybe it's the paradoxical lyric near the end:

So we cheated and we lied and we tested.
And we never failed to fail; it was the easiest thing to do.

I'm always a sucker for apparently-self-contradictory aphorisms!

(cf. OnFailure (1999-07-13), TrueNames (2003-10-16), ...)

TopicPoetry - TopicEntertainment - TopicLanguage - TopicPersonalHistory - 2005-07-28

(correlates: GoodFailure, CoherentInterference, Espoo, ...)