More Than This - A Study of the Now

I bought the Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry cd to replace an old cassette. This tells you something about the music contained therein—how it fits into my life even after twenty years from its initial release—and how much meaning I find in the music. On the cd is a song written by Bryan Ferry titled, More Than This, and this song might be familiar to everyone as the one featured in the Sophia Coppola film, Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.

In the movie, Bill Murray, in a rather halting, broken-voiced, yet thoroughly charming manner sings the words:

I could feel at the time
there was no way of knowing
fallen leaves in the night
who can say where they’re blowing
as free as the wind
and hopefully learning
why the sea on the tide
has no way of turning

More then this--you know, there’s nothing
more than this-- tell me one thing
more than this--there’s nothing


Meanwhile, in the background the soft, synthesized melody punctuates the loneliness-induced attraction between Murray and Johansson.

More than this—there is nothing.

The very vagueness of the song leads one into a revery. It has a very smooth, easy melody. It speaks specifically of nothing, yet implies a great deal. Something is happening—but there are no words to really express the feeling. Just a vague description of the moment.

If ever a song can make you smile to yourself about some random moment of absolute existence it is this one. And the song makes you remember again the feeling of lightness, wholeness, and absoluteness of the experience.

Maslow, the psychologist, calls these random moments ‘peak experiences.’ And that is the name most of us know the experience by—moments with their own intrinsic value, disoriented in time and space, accompanied by a loss of fear, anxiety, doubts, and inhibitions. And moreover, it is said these moments are timeless, spaceless, and are even characterized by a sense of unity, in which the subject and object become one.

It almost sounds religious—and in fact, some refer to it as mystical experience. But it is more than that. It is self-affirming and self-justifying. It’s a moment says very clearly, “I am here”—rather like the ‘you are here’ signs at the mall—and all the preconceived self-definitions, all the experiences that have colluded and conspired to make you ‘you’ seem to be of little significance. ‘You’ are this moment. ‘You’ are a being that feels this moment, that feels this whole and this good. “You’ feel yourself at an essential level, without all the labeling, both self-imposed and external, and without even the crutch of time.

You are here.

I had this experience recently, driving down the road to Fort Myers Beach on a warm spring evening, with the sun setting over the beach to my right. More Than This was playing on the radio. The man I most truly love, and have loved for years, rode beside me. As I drove along, no thought troubled my mind. No old business plagued my happiness. No worries for the future clouded my enjoyment. It was just that moment, riding in the car, with the sun pouring light on me, and the music playing gently. Nothing else had to be said about it. Nothing else could be described about it. Just me and the synthesized beat of the song rocking my brain like a lullaby, and the time and place that seemed like perfection. The moment passed, and my life resumed as normal, but the moment changed my outlook in a subtle way.

More than this—there is nothing.

Moments like these are an invitation to unload old self-definitions. Whether we call ourselves wives, mothers, fathers, professionals, students, workers, betrayed, abused, abandoned, actualized--these are invitations to look over that list of self-defintion and choose the ones we want. Perhaps we want none of them, and we choose to start with a clean slate—a tabula rasa of who we are. That’s the beauty of being human, that ease of shedding skin to be whatever we choose to be.