It’s a song about nobility and personal sacrifice, about doing what’s right, even if your heart is telling you otherwise. The spoken intro gave us the title for our new album: And love is not the easy thing / The only baggage you can bring / Is all that you can’t leave behind. Love, in the highest sense of the word, is the only thing that you can always take with you, in your heart. At some point you are going to have to lose everything else anyway. There’s a passage in Corinthians that uses the image of a house going through a fire, and it seems to suggest that when, in death, we eventually face judgement (or inspection, as one translation puts it) all that is made of straw and wood will be burned away, only the eternal things will survive. For me those things are family and friendship, abstract things, they’re not the things that you make. So at the end of the song, there is a litany of ambitions and achievements. You’ve got to leave it behind / All that you fashion / All that you make / All that you build / All that you break / All that you measure / All that you steal / All this you can leave behind… It is a mantra, really; a bonfire of vanities, and you can throw anything you want on the fire. That’s a really interesting question to ask: what are the things you want more than love? (Bono Vox - In: U2 by U2*, pages 366-367)
Bono’s question is stuck in my head: what do I need more than love? I’ve
stopped to thinking of it. It’s hard to find the real answer: family is the
basis of my life. I can’t live without my parents and sister. They can’t live
without me. Friends, as Bono said, are “abstract things”, which made spend a
long time thinking of. I’ve had friend I supposed were to forever, I and unfortunately,
they don’t. In other hands, have friends who had helped me when I never expected… For sure,
friendship is something I want more than love, because I believe it IS a king of love. My doubt is: how can
I know what friendship is for real or isn’t? After all the suffering feelings
my last “best friend forever” had made me feel, I’m never sure who is in fact a
friend for heart…
While I still have no answer for this friendship question, what are the
other things I need more than love?! What are the other things I need more than
love… There’s just a word that can describe
it: believe. I need to believe. I need to believe that all my dreams come true.
I need to believe in love. I need to believe that I’ll be set on the fire and I’ll
pass through it. I need to believe that everything, in the end, it’s gonna be
alright. I need to believe all the sacrifices I did, I’m doing and I’ll do in
the future are for a good reason. I need to believe God is by my side whatever
I do, wherever I go. Life is not easy, however, If I believe I won’t give up
while I’m crossing the hard times that are coming.
Family, friends and believe. These are the things I need more than love.
And you?! What can you tell me about this singular question?!
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*U2 by U2 is a book that tells us all the trajectory of this Irish band. It was created from more than 150 hours of interviews with Bono Vox, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr. and Paul McGuinness (manager). The questions are by Neil McCornick, Daily Telegraph rock critic.
__________________
*U2 by U2 is a book that tells us all the trajectory of this Irish band. It was created from more than 150 hours of interviews with Bono Vox, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr. and Paul McGuinness (manager). The questions are by Neil McCornick, Daily Telegraph rock critic.
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