There’s a fun old-timey song called It’s Only A Paper Moon. There’s a version of Erin McKeown which I really like:

According to Wikipedia it’s an old jazz standard which was written for a 1932 play, The Great Magoo. It was about a womanizer who fell hard for a Coney Island dance hall girl. She briefly becomes famous when a recording of her singing It’s Only A Paper Moon becomes famous on the radio. According to an L.A. Times review of the play, “both lovers are Olympic-caliber boozers who swan dive into the gutter at the least hint of a romantic reversal.” Apparently it only ran for eleven performances.

The song featured the next year in a movie called Take A Chance, then waned in popularity until it was covered by popular singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole in the WW2 era.

Here, by the way, is a 1933 recording of it:

I like Erin’s version better.

It’s got a very interesting theme, which is, roughly, levels of reality. This was something that came up in a discussion between Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Barron, and a professor whose name escapes me at the moment. They were discussing religious experiences, and how everyone who has them (however they do) describes them as more real than everyday experience. It stands to reason that if a person truly encounters the divine, they will feel the world something of a shadow in comparison. What this song gets at, though, is that the same thing applies even within creation. Some things are just more real than others.

The particular that it discusses is romantic love, of course; that is, after all, the subject of about 99.8% of all popular songs. Still, it’s true as far as it goes, even if it doesn’t go very far. It goes quite a lot farther than the people who believe that sub-atomic particles are the ultimate reality go, though, and that’s the era that this song was written for.