Education Quote by Art Garfunkel

There is a whole era tucked into the offhand shrug of "I can't remember us working it out". Garfunkel drops you into a very specific New York: Columbia’s Architecture school on one side, Queens on the other, connected by a car ride and a handful of new songs. The detail is doing cultural work. Architecture isn’t just biographical trivia; it signals a mind trained on structure, proportion, and polish. Then Paul Simon arrives from Queens with material in motion, the borough-to-Ivy-League commute mirroring the duo’s chemistry: the streetwise songwriter bringing raw drafts into a more rarefied, craft-obsessed setting.

The subtext is that the mythology of genius collaboration is often retrospective. We want the cinematic version: two young artists at a piano, hashing out chords until sunrise. Garfunkel refuses that script. His memory lapse reads less like evasiveness than like honesty about how creative partnerships actually function. The "working it out" may have been incremental, mundane, even bureaucratic - a schedule squeezed between classes, rehearsals, and the friction of two ambitious people with different instincts.

It also hints at a quiet power dynamic. Simon "showing" songs positions him as the primary generator, Garfunkel as the receiver, the arranger, the interpreter. Yet by placing himself in architecture, Garfunkel subtly argues for his own authorship: not necessarily of melodies, but of design - the harmonies, the sound, the finish that made those songs feel inevitable. The quote captures collaboration as lived experience, not legend: commuting, borrowing time, and only later realizing you were building a canon.