Time passes slowly up here in the daylight
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right
On the page, you are likely to glimpse the having to try so hard; in performance, you are sure to hear it, compounded vocally and musically so that it really won’t stay right. “Up here in the mountains”, from the opening, has become, here at the closing, “up here in the daylight”, which is perfectly calm, but the rhyme of “daylight” with “stay right” is tense: you have to stay cautiously with “stay” for a moment, and you have to make sure that you get “right” right when it comes to the run of the words or rather to their halting.
Time passes slowly up here in the daylight
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right
Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day
Time passes slowly and fades away
This final verse plaits its rhymes as no previous verse had done: “daylight”
This is no love song, a no-love song. It would all feel less hopeless if things were over and done with. But. “Time passes slowly when you’re searching for love”. This entailing some sour soul-searching.
Those three words, “Time passes slowly”, open the song, open it up. They open the first and last lines of the first and last verses, and of the second (the remaining) verse they open the last line. They are perspicuously absent from the song’s bridge. Five lines of the verses’ twelve begin with “Time passes slowly”, five times the bridge rings no changes on a different tedium of words, five of them:
Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town
Ain’t no reason to go to the fair
Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down
Ain’t no reason to go anywhere
This is obdurate, blockish, an evocation of a dangerous state of mind. Indifference can harden, before long, into something damnable: “accidie”, sloth, torpor. The Oxford English Dictionary says that this is “the proper term for the 4th cardinal sin, sloth, sluggishness”, and that when its Greek origin (= non-caring-state, heedlessness) was forgotten, the Latin acidum, sour, lent its harsh flavour to the word. Not-caring: or, Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town, or to go to the fair, or to go up, or to go down, or to go anywhere. No go. You name it, I’ll disclaim it. Can you reason with someone who just keeps saying Ain’t no reason to? It might even vie with the vista of the child’s Why?
“Apathy’ is a word that drifts to mind, but apathy doesn’t carry the bone-deep surrender that is the accent of accidie. “Her sin is her lifelessness”.145 Beckett could joke about “a new lease of apathy”; you can’t pull that off with accidie, the extremity of not-caring that has been characterized as “an acquiescence in discouragement which reaches the utmost of sadness when it ceases to be regretful”.146
The lines of the song’s bridge do have their equanimity all right, but it is an emptied equanimity that has persuaded itself (as Satan did) that it will be able to say farewell to despair if it says farewell to hope. It acquiesces, yes, but so grimly as to bring home that it constitutes no bridge from this not-caring to any other state of mind. Thank Somebody that there is, elsewhere in Dylan, a world elsewhere:
Happiness is but a state of mind
Anytime you want to you can cross the state line
So sings Waitin’ for You,147 and very happily, too. But unhappinessis convicted, convinced that there is nothing, nobody, to wait for. And it has long ceased to see any point in making an effort. “Ain’t no reason to go anywhere” – and that includes going across the state line into the state of mind that is happiness.
“Time passes slowly and fades away” – this, too, is an estranging thing to say. There is a glimpse of the lethal state of mind that asks only to kill time. But old Father Time never dies, he only fades away, or rather fades from our fading sight.
Clothes Line Saga
The not-caring, the nothingness, the depths beyond apathy even, at the heartland of Time Passes Slowly is as nothing compared to the vacuity of Clothes Line Saga, which raises small talkative mindlessness and affectlessness from down there in the Basement. Family values, of a sort, flat, faithful, not careless, just not caring. The two things that make it possible for us not to scream (“Why aren’t they screaming?”, in the words of Philip Larkin, The Old Fools) are that the song is stringently straight-faced and that it does give an adolescent’s-eye-view. The adolescent, after all (it may be a long time after – the song begins with the words “After a while”), usually turns out to be a worm that turns. (“Well, I just do what I’m told” – Do you now . . .) Time passes slowly, and so does adolescence but it does pass. Teenagers age. Meanwhile here is a vinegary vignette, the vinaigrette dressing that is Clothes Line Saga. It is sung levelly at a steady sturdy rhythm of monumental unconcern.
CLOTHES LINE SAGA
After a while we took in the clothes
Nobody said very much
Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants
Which nobody really wanted to touch
Mama come in and picked up a book
An’ Papa asked her what it was
Someone else asked, “What do you care?”
Papa said, “Well, just because”
Then they started to take back their clothes
Hang ’em on the line
It was January the thirtieth
And everybody was feelin’ fine
The next day everybody got up
Seein’ if the clothes were dry
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed
Mama, of course, she said, “Hi!”
“Have you heard the news?” he said, with a grin
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown.” “When?” “Last night”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad!”
“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it,” said the neighbor
“Just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma
Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet
I reached up, touched my shirt
And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”
I said, “Some of ’em, not all of ’em”
He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”
I said, “Sometime, not all the time”
Then my neighbor, he blew his nose
Just as papa yelled outside
“Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring