All Things Must Pass

by George Harrison

A sunrise doesn't last all morning
A cloudburst doesn't last all day
Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away

A sunset doesn't last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
After all this, my love is up and must be leaving
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away

All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day

Now the darkness only stays the nighttime
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away

Pretzel Logic

by Donald Fagen

I would love to tour the Southland
In a travelling minstrel show
Yes, I'd love to tour the Southland
In a traveling minstrel show

Yes, I'm dying to be a star and make them laugh
Sound just like a record on the phonograph
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago

I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time

'Cause he looks so fine upon that hill
They tell me he was lonely, he's lonely still
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago

I stepped up on the platform
The man gave me the news
He said, 'You must be joking, son
'Where did you get those shoes?'

Well, I've seen them on the TV, the movie show
They say the times are changing, but I just don't know
These things are gone forever
Over a long time ago

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

by Sandy Denny

Across the evening sky
All the birds are leaving
But how can they know
It's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire
I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad, deserted shore
Your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know
It's time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone
While my love is near me
I know it will be so
Until it's time to go
So come the storms of winter
And then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?

Tonight, Tonight

by Billy Corgan

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change, the less you feel

Believe, believe in me
Believe that life can change
That you're not stuck in vain
We're not the same
We're different tonight

And you know you're never sure
But you're sure you could be right
If you held yourself up to the light
And the embers never fade
In your city by the lake
The place where you were born

Believe, believe in me
Believe in the resolute urgency of now
And if you believe
There's not a chance tonight

We'll crucify the insincere tonight
We'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight
We'll find a way to offer up the night tonight
The indescribable moments of your life tonight
The impossible is possible tonight
Believe in me as I believe in you tonight

The Dry Salvages (Pt. V)

[Pt. IV here]
by T.S. Eliot

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

[Little Gidding here]

Reelin' in the Years

by Donald Fagen

Your everlasting summer, and you can see it fading fast
So you grab a piece of something that you think is going to last
You wouldn't know a diamond if you held it in your hand
The things you think are precious, I can't understand

Are you reelin' in the years?
Stowin' away the time?
Are you gatherin' up the tears?
Have you had enough of mine?

You've been telling me you're a genius since you were seventeen
In all the time I've known you I still don't know what you mean
The weekend at the college didn't turn out like you planned
The things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand

I've spent a lot of money, and I've spent a lot of time
The trip we made to Hollywood is etched upon my mind
After all the things we've done and seen, you find another man
The things you think are useless, I can't understand

Already Yesterday

by Steve Kilbey

It's already yesterday
We're off the calendar
I heard the sirens play
Just like an orchestra
Mechanical bird of prey
Sing for your emperor
Last broken flash of love
Still in the camera

We don't feel those locks and chains
We won't listen to the lizard part of our brains
Giving the orders
Another morning we'll be gone
I start the car for Ten Mile Beach
And maybe Avalon across the water

It's already yesterday
And nobody's answering
Disconnected, drift away
Nobody's questioning
Head silver, feet of clay
Who is surrendering?
They fall in our heyday
I am remembering

We can't feel those aches and pains
We won't listen to the voices in the city rain
Giving the orders
Another morning I'll be gone
I start the car for Violet Town
And then to Babylon, over the border

The Dry Salvages (Pt. III)

[Pt. II here]
by T.S. Eliot

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
'Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death"—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
                              O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
                                   Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

[Pt. IV here]

The Dry Salvages (Pt. II)

[Pt. I here]
by T.S. Eliot

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

[Pt. III here]

As I Walked Out One Evening

by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
     Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
     Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
     I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
     'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
     Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
     And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
     Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
     Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
     For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
     And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
     Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
     You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
     Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
     And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
     Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
     To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
     Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
     And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
     Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
     And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
     The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
     A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
     And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
     And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror?
     O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
     Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
     As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
     With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
     The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
     And the deep river ran on.