Remember this?
Some enchanted evening
When you find your true love,
When you feel her call you
Across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side,
And make her your own
Or all through your life you
May dream all alone.
Am I out of sync with this 21st century world when I say the words of that beautiful song still send shivers up and down my spine. In this world of “relationships” rather than marriages, of “partners” instead of husbands/wives, is the sentiment behind it a curious relic of a bygone age?
I wonder.
We live in a society where certain political and commercial cartels appear to have an interest in engulfing our cultural antennae with a constantly recurring tsunami of sexuality until every taboo has been swept aside. So, is there room for that notion of romance – the sheer unbounding sense of exhilaration when a man or a woman wants to be by your side and where sex is merely one manifestation of that sweet surrender of oneself to another?
For many years western popular music proved a reliable and universally acceptable vehicle for expressing the magic of that moment, either via gentle, light hearted joy
…or with the the bittersweet emotion of parting
Sometimes we wanted to broadcast to the whole of mankind that we were together by going anywhere and everywhere arm in arm
On the other hand it could be a more wistful almost ethereal dreamscape where the rest of the world scarcely mattered
Romance could sometimes be a roller coaster of emotion marked by a deep sense of yearning when your other half was elsewhere and all you had was emptiness
A cascade of words could splash the canvas of love with shimmering, vibrant colours of devotion
But a love could also be so deep that being together in itself was sufficient and no words were needed
So do songs like these have no resonance with young (or even old) people today?
I would wager that they do but as a modern music of the underground, the new cultural samizdat, publicly disowned but privately treasured…
…and these words, easily mocked by a corrupt and cynical media, must surely still strike a chord across a million crowded rooms…
Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!
