The fireside, the hearth, is the place for storytelling. The telling of tales is the work of the artist. The adventure that just took place adds on to the tradition, passed on from uncle to singer. They savour the recollection of the past in the present. In the end, the shared dream is the consummation of desire.

The great epics, as in the Odyssey, often begin with a story being told. The story within the story is the adventure re-told. We may imagine the singer telling the story to the uncle.

The singer has freely chosen to place himself in this dangerous situation. He needs a desperate plan because, we may suppose, he prefers this Sunday escapade to life in the rat race. In Subdivisions Rush expresses the other side of the coin. The need for desperation comes from the oppressive conformity of the controlling society. In such conformism desperation, which is normally avoided, actually becomes desirable.

This is a game to the driver, hence the laughter. The reality of the danger and the pressure to be creative lead to the combination of the opposed emotions of fear and hope.
“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.” So wrote Nietzsche (The Will to Power), expressing the paradoxical power of the human ability to laugh.

The strain on the driver and his car are actually the goal of the escapade, leading to a peak experience. Peak experiences are described by Abraham Maslow (1964) as especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective). They usually come on suddenly and are often inspired by deep meditation, intense feelings of love, exposure to great art or music, or the overwhelming beauty of nature.

The wind is an image of freedom and movement, created by the play of natural forces. High and low pressure systems move in relation to each other causing the air to flow. This play of forces is mirrored in the working of the car, which is the source of freedom for the driver.

The winds are personalized in mythology, as in the Greek Aeolus, the ruler of the winds. This personalization of natural forces in mythology is seen in the identification of the driver and wind in this line.

The pastoral landscape is itself jarred by the image of the mountainside: an obtrusion of rock which bars the way, just as the danger does. The mountain stands in for the huge car which lurks ahead.

The whole being of the driver is keyed up to a pitch of awareness by the zest of the moment. The physiological image of every nerve aware reflects a heightened state of consciousness, a creativity which is akin to the notion of flow.
Flow (proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihály) is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

The speed of the car gives the effect of a blurred landscape, piling on, in parallel, the visual effect of nature with the shining chrome. These parallels synthesize the experience of the driver in one whole. There is a convergence of the beauty of the moment.