Geneve Journal: Riding in the middle class

The Nabokov quote in the previous post comes at the very beginning of his autobiography, Speak, Memory.  Reading it immediately brought to mind the lyric of Lyle Lovett's and I wanted to bookend the two together with interpretive illustrations of each.   I'm lumping these posts in with the Geneve Journal posts not because they deal with the Geneva project directly, but that they very much resonate with this moment of  hitting forty and reflecting on being IN the middle.  Or in THE middle.  One response I received from a friend and supporter of the Kickstarter project (thanks to everyone who pushed it over the top, btw)  suggested that forty is hardly middle aged...50 is the new 40 and such...but I figure that at this point, I'll be mighty lucky to make it much passed 80.  Shoot.  I'll feel ever so fortunate to make it to that round, temporal punctum of four and twenty years -as the French phrase it- and I'm boldly claiming this position, smack in the middle and banking on the full downhill ride.

The Lyle Lovett lyric is part of the song  I Think You Know What I Mean, which is on his 1994 album I love Everybody.  If I recall, this album was released shortly after the break up of his marriage to Julia Roberts.  However, the songs gathered on the album (If I'm able to further recall) date from very early in his career.  I love Everybody is a power-pack of very short Id-oriented expressions, catchy, frothy, somewhat un-p.c., and together are a satisfying release of pent up thoughts and personally held truisms.  I've just recently started listening to the album again after several years.  the brevity and sharpness of the tunes move one along handily.  My favorite part of the song in question comes near the end and is yet another visual rhyme on the theme of the inexorably linear conveyor on which we find ourselves:

But it's springtime in Texas
And my memory grows faint
As the bluebonnets dance
With the indian paints
The highway is lonesome
But the highway is straight
And some things are heavy
But they ain't worth the weight