Leonard Cohen’s “That’s How The Light Gets In” Methodology Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be

The Leonard Cohen Corrections Agency

The Leonard Cohen Corrections Agency is a privately-funded organization dedicated to the rectification of inaccuracies promulgated by Leonard Cohen, no small task given the Canadian singer-songwriter’s admission that “I don’t want to let the facts get in the way of the truth.”¹

Cracking Wise

Today’s post focuses on establishing limits of validity of these well known lines from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Now, DrHGuy is happy – nay, ecstatic to stipulate that this is a genuinely insightful and propitious conceit.

It is also, however, a poetic metaphor and, like most members of that species, it is oversimplified and hyperbolic.  This is the nature of the beast.  Any expression of a philosophical, intellectual, scientific, sociological, … concept that takes into account every possible circumstance, outcome, interpretation, etc is less likely to be a song or poem than a dense treatise in a professional journal or, worse, a legal document.  And no one, not even Leonard Cohen is going to win over an audience by singing the municipal zoning ordinances of Tempe, Arizona.

It seems, however, that the lines in question,

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

are approaching Hallelujah-levels of ubiquity in certain environments and  have become correspondingly more frequently accepted as a universal axiom, obviating any need for critical assessment.

Seeing The Light

It has, as a result, become necessary to issue the following two clarifications:

1. The expression, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”  does not mean that cracks always let in light or only let in light. The crack in the Titanic, for example, let in a boatload of the North Atlantic Ocean.

2. Nor does it restrict the entry of light to structural flaws.  A well made skylight, for instance, is designed to and quite frequently does let in a good deal of light.

Just keep those two points in mind, and we’ll all be better off.

1. See Leonard Cohen Tells Sexologist About His Dog, His Mother, His Impermanence, Seduction, Men As Cocker Spaniels, and Rules Between Men & Women

   Cases already completed have ranged from cleaning up simple verbal typos such as Cohen’s misidentification of the decade in which he met the young Spaniard who taught him guitar lessons (it was the 50s, not the 60s – Leonard Cohen: The Prince Of Asturias Awards Speech With Annotations & Commentary) to setting right mistaken references such as the name of the fast food chain that ran the 1984 “Where’s The Beef?” advertising campaign (it was a promotion for Wendy’s not Burger King or McDonald’s as Mr. Cohen stated – Rarely Viewed Video – Leonard Cohen On His Atrocious Voice, Dylan, Lead Belly, Ice-T, Songwriting, Love, & Where’s The Beef) to spotlighting inconsistencies such as Mr. Cohen taking both sides in a debate about the relationship of his songs and his poems:

   … I regard everything I write as being set to music, almost as if I hear a giant guitar accompanying me! (Leonard Cohen Seventeen. March 1968)

   I never did set poetry to music. … I got stuck with that. It was a bum rap. I never set a poem to music. I’m not that hopeless. I know the difference between a poem and a song! (“Porridge? Lozenge? Syringe?” by Adrian Deevoy, Q Magazine, 1991) [↩]