Picks of the Beat 2/?

Today's pick from my collection is VNV's "Further." I usually don't think of this song when I rattle off my favorite VNV songs, but there it is.

My instinctive philosophy is nihilism (that is to say, what my limbic mind reverts to), and the song addresses this from the first line:

At the end of days, at the end of time.
When the Sun burns out will any of this matter?



Except it moves to a different direction from there. As Ronan Harris puts it:

So the people who listen to, let's say, the song "Further". You can see everything as just being meaningless and ending when you expire your last breath. I don't believe that. I don't see things like that. Life has far too much meaning. We judge ourselves by our own little rules if we don't follow the law of the people who dictate our life. Or become the social norm: the sort of people who at 25 get married, finish college, and put all their money into saving. All they are doing is preparing for death. That's it, they are just preparing for when they are 65. Not those people. What I am saying is, in "Further", those who think and those who feel, do not see themselves in the same league as your average normal "boring" people. Many people feel trapped by those confines, the social constraints that are being imposed upon them. They know they feel different, but they've never been given any words to describe that. They've never met other people to say, "Ok, this is what you are. Maybe you've had a lot of trouble and are very unhappy accepting that. But this is what kind of person you are and you know that." They have actually woken up. With "Further", for me, it's about seeing life in a very eternal form. We can come again. Every person we live, all of or love and passions, will exist with us. We will go on until the end of time. This is not meaningless what we do. Our existence is not so transient and meaningless, as some people would want to make it out to be. There is a deeper meaning, if you want to find it. There is a magic that we've all lost in life.

It's a variation on Mr. Puddleglum --  here is the bare bones of reality, give up to it, and now put something on top of it. The dark night of the soul, the long test of faith, I don't really know how things will end. But I always get a little hopeful when I hear this:

I know in darkness I will find you giving up inside like me.