Composition and Lyrics
In his autobiography I, Me, Mine, Harrison writes that the song was inspired by a letter from Juan Mascaró, a Sanskrit scholar at Cambridge University, who sent him a copy of his book Lamps of Fire (a wide-ranging anthology of religious writings, including some from the Tao Te Ching) and asked him if "... might it not be interesting to put into your music a few words of Tao, for example number 48, page 66 of the book." Harrison states: "In the original poem, the verse says 'Without going out of my door, I can know the ways of heaven.' And so to prevent any misinterpretations — and also to make the song a bit longer — I did repeat that as a second verse but made it: "Without going out of your door/You can know all things on earth/ Without looking out of your window/ You can know the ways of heaven" — so that it included everybody". The passage Harrison refers to, however, corresponds to what English translations normally number as "47", rather than "48". D. C. Lau's translation of the Tao Te Ching 47, for example, states: "Without stirring abroad/One can know the whole world;/Without looking out of the window/One can see the way of heaven."
Read more about this topic: The Inner Light (song)
Famous quotes containing the words composition and, composition and/or lyrics:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Chad and I always look for deeper meanings; we can analyze Beastie Boys lyrics for hours.”
—Amy Stewart (b. 1975)