Maybe the best song on the Abbey Road album.

John Lennon claimed the electric harpsichord part was inspired by playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in reverse. This is bull.

However, what is great about that harpsichord part is that it was played by the 5th Beatle, Sir George Martin. Coincidentally, like Beethoven, Martin progressively lost his hearing in his later years.

For an assignment as a senior in high school, I brought the lyrics for this song into my English class. It was during our section on Romantic poetry. The reading I did of Keats, Coleridge, and Blake in that class inspired me to major in English in college, where I would make poetry my primary study, lead the campus literary journal, win the campus-wide writing award, and graduate summa cum laude before being deposited into the real, class-gridded world without a single benefactor like an exiled space alien.

That day in high school, upon hearing these Beatles lyrics, about the crushing emotional impact of becoming conscious of the power and scope of natural forces, the redneck North Dakotan tough guy stuffed into the desk beside mine dismissed the Beatles as just a bunch of druggies. The Beatles did abuse drugs, especially John Lennon. Ironically, I agree that drug use is destructive to society, drugs of kinds both shunned and accepted. They are the source of debilitating paranoia and half-baked thinking in many, many minds today, not to mention unknowable carnage and squalor. They have no place in my life.

But it is undeniable that the lyrics to this song, along with the totality of the song, made my world larger. Like the other poetry from that class, this song expected more out of me than I had been giving.

Maybe eventually my old high school classmate got out of North Dakota, into the world a bit, and stopped flinching at the power of his own mind. But we all know he didn't. And he is the victor of this story.