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Words and music by Emily Saliers
From the Indigo Girls album Rites of Passage (1992)
Some will strut and some will fret, see this an hour on the stage Others will not but they'll sweat in their hopelessness, in their rage. We're all the same, the men of anger and the women of the page. They published your diary and that's how I got to know you Key to the room of your own and a mind without end. Here's a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time The voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend So I know I'm all right, my life will come, my life will go Still I feel it's all right, I just got a letter to my soul When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue, Empty pages for the no longer young The apathy of time laughs in my face You say each life has it's place The hatches were battened, thunderclouds rolled and the critics stormed Battles surrounded the white flag of your youth But if you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality A hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof So you know it's all right, your life will come, your life will go Still you'll feel it's all right, someone will get a letter to your soul When your whole life was on the tip of your tongue Empty pages for the no longer young The apathy of time laughed in your face Did you hear me say each life has its place. The place where you hold me is dark in a pocket of truth The moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth And so it was for you when the river eclipsed your life But sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me and it was my rebirth So we know it's all right, life will come and life will go Still we know it's all right, someone will get a message to your soul Then you know it's all right (when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue, empty pages for the no longer young) Then you know it's all right and you feel it's all right (each life has its place, you say each life has its place) It's all right
The song was inspired by the following passage from Woolf's diary, written upon witnessing a total eclipse of the sun in 1927:
"Then --it was over till 1999. What remained was the sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light, and colour. . . . Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness." (Thursday, June 30, 1927)
Updated June 30, 1997
Created June 30, 1997