The Sound of Silence

Student Assembly at my University in Brazil! Did you find me?

When I moved to the USA, I didn’t speak any English and I meant it. After watching a lot of TV and listening to radio all day long for about 8 months, I started getting some thing. After that I worked as full time volunteer at an elementary school, which really helped me to go through TOEFL and getting at Radford University.

Well, many people and media helped me with pronunciation and so on, but not as much as Paul Simon and Garfunkel. I listened to their songs over and over again and I just got the sound of “th” with them.
Thanks guys for “Scarborough Fair”

“Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,

Without no seam or needlework,

She once was a true love of mine.”

I never had interest in the USA, since I’m a socialist person who truly doesn’t care about capital and its implication. I was a militant of the PCB- Communist Brazilian Party and my comrades and me were dreamers, wonderful utopist dreamers.
I was so serious about that, that I remember wearing a pair of denim pants and sneakers just when I was already in law school. We believed that wearing those US symbols we were compacting with the imperialists thoughts and betraying our Latin Americans brothers and sisters! I wish it were that simple… we were so naïve!!
OH, BOY!! I got emotional now remembering that. How many times I left home before dawn to meet my comrades for meetings, since communist party was illegal… how many protest parades I went to, how many times the police got me brutally with their “ideology eraser” also knowing as rubber baton! Thanks, my kidney is always asking about you guys!

We, my friends and I, loved and love to put our faces there, down the streets to show our opinion and to show that we think and we don’t need anybody to think for us. People died in Brazil not long ago, combating 21 years of dictatorship governs! I had professors in college that were tortured and/or exiled. They just returned to Brazil after amnesty!
We can think freely now!!

Anyway…oh my God, I’m so prolix! Coming back...
There was a jeans/denim brandy named “USTOP! I love the double-interpretation of that! However the TV’s propaganda was something like “USTOP! The only way, the freedom way”! Oh my God, I hated that so much!!! I still have many and many reserves with the USA, but I know how to separate things now. I wear jeans, (not that much because I really don’t feel comfortable, I prefer linen or cotton) and I like wearing sneakers shoes!

I hope I didn’t lose my point with my little traveling. Nope, I did not!
So, even though Brazil respired US songs, I didn’t listen to them, for the same reason I didn’t use jeans/denim and sneakers. But I remember once, I went to a radio station and I hear a song that I really liked. I asked the radio guy who was singing and he said it was Paul Simon and Garfunkel! As I didn’t know any English, I decided not to ask anybody who spoke it to help me understand that song. I was afraid that song could have words and thoughts that I didn’t share and I could lose the beauty and the force of its melody in my heart!
Stubborn? A little!

When I bought the CD, “The Concert in Central Park” by Paul Simon and Garfunkel, already leaving in the US, I got home crazy to listen to it to find that melody that was still in my mind. Of course I didn’t know the name of that song but I knew the melody by heart!

Ladies and Gentlemen... Simon and Garfunkel and the most beautiful song...

♪ The Sound of Silence ♪

Hello darkness, my old friend,

I've come to talk with you again,

Because a vision softly creeping,

Left its seeds while I was sleeping,

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone,

'Neath the halo of a street lamp,

I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

That split the night

And touched the sound of silence.
And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more.

People talking without speaking,

People hearing without listening,

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dare

Disturb the sound of silence.
"Fools" said I,

"You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows.

Hear my words that I might teach you,

Take my arms that I might reach you."

But my words like silent raindrops fell,

And echoed In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made.

And the sign flashed out its warning,

In the words that it was forming.

And the sign said,

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls."

And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.

- Paul Simon - "Wednesday Morning 3A.M.", 1964