53 Second Song

I watched 500 Days of Summer. I'm a bit surprised that I liked the concept behind it. I guess for me it's kind of summarized in this song from the score of the movie, called Train Ride Home (because it plays during a scene in which the characters are, ahem, riding the train home) by Mychael Danna and Rob Simonsen. It's only 53 seconds long. But I think it sort of embodies, to me, what the movie it about.

It's about what I love: inspiration. It starts on a blank canvas of quiet sounds, and builds with the piano and strings into something uplifting and hopeful. It lets you see into something that you couldn't see before, and then- it ends.

As I go along in life, I'm realizing that I'm starting to measure the time passing in years. I look at things and want to parenthesize everything into segments of organized and logical time. But life isn't meant to be measures that way- time is just how we keep track of it, like ledger lines. This 53 second song is an idea that encompasses the whole movie- 500 days. I'm thinking that maybe there are moments in my life- only brief, passing moments, that encompass my life to date. Maybe there are brief less-than-a-minute melodies floating in and out of the years I anally keep track of. I think those melodies are important, and I think that maybe I should be writing them down.

He sketched skylines. He took what he saw and put it down on paper. He created and moved. He used his heart- poured everything into what he believed was true. But isn't it the case that sometimes, no matter how badly we want something to work...it just isn't meant to? It seems out of place and unexpected for something to build so much and then just stop. I don't know why that's what I like about this movie, this 53 second song. The 500 day journey Tom went on with Summer were human, and some might say that in the end, it was all for nothing.

But there are melodies there in the bylines of the pictures we take. There are driving beats and thoughtful piano that belong to the moments we can't forget.

Maybe a 53 second song is worth 500 days of...yearning in the wrong direction, for the wrong person. Take the melody with you. Leave the rest.