Free Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden Page A

standards) room at a pub-hotel in the village of Carlops .
    The ten-mile walk to Carlops took us across the Pentland Hills, which lie southwest of Edinburgh. It was a pleasant stroll through upland pastures and heather-clad moors. And, although we were never more than ten miles from the city centre, the hills were so empty and quiet that we might have been a hundred miles from anywhere.
    On such a short, easy walk, there was no point hurrying. So we spent the day ambling rather than hiking, and stopped frequently to enjoy the scenery. I spent a lot of time listening to music as I walked, and supplemented traditional Scottish songs with rock-and-roll hits of the fifties and sixties. It was fabulous.
    Walking, and having nothing to do except walk, and having nothing to distract me and pull me out of the moment as I walked, enabled me to listen to music the way I listened to it as a teenager: with complete and unforced attention.
    Certain songs moved me deeply, especially, I noticed, those that expressed simple heartfelt emotions. For example, The Teddy Bears’ 1958 hit ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’, The Dixie Cups’ 1964 hit ‘Chapel of Love’, and the 1964 hit ‘Soldier Boy’ by The Shirelles.
    Those songs rekindled the feeling I had when I was in my late teens and suddenly realized that life and happiness were simple matters after all: love this girl . . . win this girl . . . and, in the words of The Dixie Cups, ‘never be lonely any more’.
    This is the essence of romantic love, which Schopenhauer describes so accurately and so pithily as ‘this longing that closely associates the notion of an endless bliss with the possession of a definite woman, and an unutterable pain with the thought that this possession is not available’.
    Most of us have felt like this at some period of our lives. And few of us have not since learned that life and love are never quite so simple. But those sentimental old songs with their naive optimism take us back to those wonderful times – which is, I guess, why we love them so much.
    And the interesting thing about them, artistically speaking, is the emotional punch they pack into a few simple words.
    It doesn’t take a genius, of course, to understand that simple words can be an effective medium for expressing uncomplicated emotions. But knowing precisely which words to use, and in what order to put them – that’s the tricky bit. That’s where the artistry comes in.
    Take some of those early Beatles songs for example: ‘Love me Do’, ‘Ask Me Why’, ‘From Me to You’, and so on. They use simple words to express uncomplicated emotions, but, even though they’re great songs, they pack no emotional punch. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever getting misty-eyed over ‘Love Me Do’.
    Now, by way of contrast, consider ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’.
    The first verse uses just fourteen different words, thirteen of them polysyllabic, but it captures perfectly – and I mean perfectly  – the tenderness and innocence of early-stage romantic love.
    So what’s so special about those words in that order? And how does the songwriter choose them?
    I spent a long time, as I ambled across the Pentland Hills, musing upon this. When, for example, Phil Spector wrote the magical first line of ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’ was it poetic inspiration? Or did he just get lucky?
    Ditto for the equally simple-yet-poignant lyrics of ‘Chapel of Love’ and ‘Soldier Boy’. Did the songwriters lovingly craft those words, knowing that they perfectly express the excitement and unalloyed joy of young love? Or did they just stumble upon them?
    In my normal, distracted, overstimulated frame of mind, I don’t suppose I would have made much progress on those questions. But in my walking-induced, meditative frame of mind, I felt that I had the time, the energy, and the clarity of mind to pursue them.
    I came to the conclusion that moments of perfection in song-writing occur when the