A few brief thoughts on “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

“There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

This repeated line in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem has struck a cord in the collective consciousness; I hear it regularly, in contexts far removed from its source, generally. What is it about this odd metaphor that catches the imagination? I wonder.

The admission of light is, of course, appealing. Physically, it rescues us from darkness . . . or blindness. Metaphorically, it suggests epiphany, insight or understanding. Are we really beholden to brokenness as a precondition for understanding? Sounds like a topic for an adult Sunday School class, possibly, the question being something like: Are suffering, pain, brokenness—cracks—necessary for the gaining of wisdom, of understanding?

It’s fair to say, I think, that until we’ve experienced illness, we don’t fully appreciate health. Similarly, the death of a loved one can make us wiser about the astounding fact that we’ve been gifted with life, consciousness, love, hope in the first place.

Leonard Cohen expressed the world he knew poetically; musing on the act of making poetry, he wrote:

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

Probably none but you, Leonard. (On the other hand, I had some thoughts on cracks that let in light . . . and wrote this down, although I am no poet.)

I would love to sit down over coffee with Leonard Cohen and just talk about where light came from for him, but, alas, he’s dead. I would tell him that through his poetry and songs, he gave me more light than I deserved. I remember teaching a Literature class in Thompson, Manitoba and discovering Cohen’s amazing “crack” on the subject of what it means to be Jewish after the Holocaust:

(From “The Genius.”)

For you

I will be a Broadway jew

and cry in theatres

for my mother

and sell bargain goods

beneath the counter

I despair when I hear people misusing, even abusing, Cohen’s Hallelujah, most often as a consequence of “hallelujah” being primarily a religious word. In the song, the shout of triumph, the “hallelujah” applies first of all to the triumphant climax of love, but later becomes the triumph of disappointment, of indifference, even violence and conquest: a cold and broken hallelujah. Cohen has said that the gestation period for the song was about five years, and that he wrote many verses, those he would sing most recently being the few he picked out of the lot to most closely make a coherent whole.

I like the interview Adrienne Clarkson did with a young Leonard Cohen, a conversation revealing much about the man and what he would become. I like particularly his reference to the “horizontal integrity” of art: it’s object should be to illuminate the world in which we live now, not to create a monument to last forever.

Maybe light does only come through our cracks?