Well, there ain’t nobody safer than someone who doesn’t care
And it isn’t even lonely when no one’s ever there
I had a lot of dreams once, but some of them came true . . .
The honey’s sometimes bitter when fortune falls on you
So you know I’ve been a soldier in the armies of the night1
And I’ll find the fatal error in what’s otherwise alright2
But here you’re trembling like a sparrow, I will try with all my might
To give you just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little light3
I have always heard that virtue oughta be its own reward,4
But it never comes so easy when you’re living by the sword5
It’s even harder to be heartless when you look at me that way
You’re as mighty as the flower that will grow the stones away
Even though I been a stranger, full of irony and spite
Holding little but contempt for all things beautiful and bright,6
Something shines around you and it seems, to my delight
To give me just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little light
This could be just another highway, coiled up in the night
You could be just another whitetail, baby, stranded on my brights,7
There’s a tingling recognition
Like the sound of distant thunder
And I begin to wonder
If the love I’ve driven under
Won’t ignite
So you know I’ve been a soldier in the armies of the night
And I’ll find the fatal error in what’s otherwise alright
Something shines around you that seems, to my delight
To give me just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little sweetness . . .
Just a little light
Words by John Barlow and Brent Mydland
Music by Brent Mydland
Norman Mailer used this phrase as the title of his 1968 “nonfiction novel” about an antiwar march on the Pentagon in 1967, and it won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He took it from the last line of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold, in turn, was probably referring to a specific battle, fought at night and usually assumed to be Thucydides’ account of the Battle of Epipolae in his Peloponnesian Wars (chapter XXII):
The Athenians now fell into great disorder and perplexity, so that it was not easy to get from one side or the other any detailed account of the affair. By day certainly the combatants have a clearer notion, though even then by no means of all that takes place, no one knowing much of anything that does not go on in his own immediate neighbourhood; but in a night engagement (and this was the only one that occurred between great armies during the war) how could any one know anything for certain?
Some critics think, however, that Arnold may have been making a reference to Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, in which he recounts the “last, dim, weird battle of the west,” the battle of Camlann (ca. A.D. 540):
Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight
Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.
A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear; and ev’n on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.
A computer-screen message indicating that something is very wrong. The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Electronics and Computer Technology has this definition: “An error in a computer program which causes running of the program to be terminated.”
Another reference to Arnold: In his Culture and Anarchy, the first chapter is called “Sweetness and Light.”
From a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Friendship,” published in his Essays: “The only reward of virtue is virtue.”
Matthew was the only writer of the Gospels to report the words of Jesus, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” (Matthew 26:52)
This is the second use by Barlow of a line from the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (1848) by Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–95):
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”
The other is in “Weather Report Suite, Part 2”: “Let It Grow.”
Whitetail deer are known to stare, as if hypnotized, into the lights of oncoming traffic, especially in rural areas. They will stand still and often get hit.
Written in Martinez, California, January 27, 1989.
Studio recording: Built to Last (October 31, 1989).
First performance: February 7, 1989, at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, California.