Posted on by schmidtemilyk

The Meaning

My father has a tendency to try to be “artistic” he calls it. To read into things and figure out the deeper meaning. “What do you think that means?” He will ask about a song lyric or a line in a film. Usually I have to scold him, because the meaning is obvious, or the line is exactly what it says it is. It stands alone. It is it’s own meaning.

I know he does it to try to relate to me, which is nice, but I am far too old and far too different in interests to critique and interpret things with him. He doesn’t realize I don’t do that anymore. Critiques I do for design and for visual work, but as for verbal or written words I no longer find time or need to decipher them.

I am reading Robert Frost right now. Just a book of 300 pages I found and rescued from a thrift store shelf. I relate to his work. There is beautiful sadness in there. There is no need to interpret sadness. No need to unravel the metaphors he uses, because to do so would make the analysis inaccurate. Sometimes they are stand alone meanings. Sometimes they have no meaning at all. They just have deeper feelings. Deeper emotions that only one who has experienced those same feelings knows and can understand. You know them when the words leave your head to take refuge in your heart. How do you interpret that? How does one analyze an emotion one doesn’t know? It is impossible. One can only feel it and dwell wondering if anyone else knows that same feeling.

To my father it is a head thing. An intellectual, and perhaps a little shallow, analysis. To me it is a soul thing. A heart thing. An emotion thing. Whatever you want to call it. It can’t be analyzed for meaning. Perhaps in composition, but certainly not meaning. We didn’t write it. We don’t know the intention. We don’t know the metaphor for sure. We can’t feel what Robert Frost felt exactly. We can only understand how it makes us feel. How we think we can relate to it. We know what we project upon it, and only by how we feel can we find that meaning for ourselves. We build a personal relationship with those words. Then we build a human around those words, and give it the authors name.

That becomes the meaning.