A Paul McCartney Song That Makes Me Cry

This song has always filled me with a sense of melancholy and longing, and almost unbearable poignancy.

The song is “The Long and Winding Road,” from the Beatles album Let It Be. Particularly the line “Don’t leave me standing here, take me to your door.”

Why does that song, that line seize my heart so?

Don’t we all suffer from a kind of homesickness, a sense that we stand outside the door of reality?

When we were children, at least for some of us some of the time, our experience was seamless. As we grow and our self-image, as opposed to our actual raw experience of the flow of life, comes to capture more and more our attention, we live at a distance from ourselves, and from the unfolding expanse of our sensory and mental experience.

We also live at more of a distance from others, who, due to the needs of our self-image, we think we need to protect ourselves from.

There’s also the loss of innocence, the transition away from the protected realms of childhood with their sense of home and parental love, at least for those of us privileged to have experienced that.

Then there’s all of our lost loves, all of our lost love.

I think all of these things combine in that one sentence.