I was just listening to the Pink Floyd song “Time” the other day, when three lines of the song struck me:
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way …
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today …
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
I had long been cognizant of a connection between the last line and something Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
… but this time I suddenly recognized two other connections between this song and Thoreau’s masterpeice:
Our life is frittered away by detail … Smplify, simplify.
as if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
I wonder what Roger and the boys had been reading when they wrote “Time”. Though I don’t see the same depth in the song that can be found in Walden, these verbal coincidences make me wonder what were their inspirations.