‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls, whispering the sound of silence.’ It is a famous line from an equally famous folk song, The Sound of Silence, composed by Paul Simon and performed together with his friend Art Garfunkel. The song criticizes today’s society for being shallow, dark, and exclusively focused on entertainment.
The ‘words of the prophets’, apparently containing a kind of warning for us to atone, remain hidden in the song. The song’s phrase – words written on the wall – is a famous expression in many European languages, inlcuding English, German, French and Dutch, derived from the biblical story of Daniel interpreting God’s hand writing on the foreign king’s palace wall: ‘mene, mene, tekel upharsin’. One can use Daniel 6 to argue what is written on Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrical wall: the end is nigh.
This is the summary of my presentation ‘Prophets write on walls. An intertextual analysis of Daniel 5 and Paul Simon’s ‘The Sound of Silence’’ given during the bi-annual congress of the European Society of Catholic Theology at Theological College of Pécs (Hungary). This year’s theme was: ‘Europe: Spiritual resources for the future.’ Below are some impressions, include some slides from y presentation and a short fragment of the presentation itself.
Frank G. Bosman 