#5, “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #5, “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen (1992)

On my right forearm, there are three lines of text.

there is a crack
in everything
that’s how the light gets in

It comes from “Anthem,” which is, to my ears, the crowning achievement of Leonard Cohen’s incredibly accomplished catalog as a songwriter. It was released in 1992, on his album The Future, which mostly saw Cohen in a bad mood. I don’t know that he ever wrote darker than he did on the album’s one-two punch of lead-off tracks, “The Future” and “Waiting for the Miracle,” and the album stays fairly apocalyptic from there. But then at the end of side one of the record—and The Future is very much a record that sounds like it was written to be listened to in two parts—he drops what’s one of the most beautiful, and hopeful, songs he ever wrote.

“Anthem” is a simple song. There are Buddhist elements to its lyrics (“don’t dwell on what has passed away / or what is yet to be”) which makes sense, because not long after this song was released, he spent five years living in a monastery. It comes from a fairly detached place, Cohen singing about the cyclical nature of—well, of everything. “The wars, they will be fought again / the holy dove, she will be caught again / bought and sold, and bought again,” he sings in the second verse, and you could be forgiven for wondering where he’s going with this, especially since the songs that come before “Anthem” on the album are so hopeless. But then he drops that chorus, the one I have tattooed on my right arm, preceding it with a mission statement that give me chills every time I think about them: “Ring the bells that still can ring / forget your perfect offering,” he sings, “There is a crack / a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.”

I don’t know. They’re just perfect words, a perfect distillation of so much about how I see the world.

It is not an easy thing, being a person who is alive in the world. We live in a world full of imperfections, and full of things that were broken by other people, maybe intentionally and maybe negligently. It can be cruel, needlessly so, and there are always those who will destroy what they have, if they think it will destroy something they’ve decided someone else shouldn’t have. And all we can do is strive to make it a little bit better, knowing that we have very little power to affect anything greater than our immediate circles. That’s true for me and you and Leonard Cohen and Kamala Harris and everyone else, I think, because the systems that make the world go are not built to be changed by any one of us. Sometimes, perhaps, you get a shot to do something more. But mostly, we are just small animals in a world full of systems bigger than any of us. So what do you do with that knowledge? You ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering.

“It’s no excuse, the dismal situation,” Cohen said of the song back in 1992. “The future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities.” I’ve always understood it to mean that despair is a rational reaction to the state of the world, and also an irrelevant one. Ring the bells that still can ring. You don’t know who will hear them, or if they will find bells of their own to ring. It won’t be perfect, but you do it anyway, because it’s what there is to do. And if the imperfections start to feel overwhelming? That’s all right. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

It’s funny. Leonard Cohen wrote many complex and complicated songs, full of lines that are too sardonic to be taken just one way; “Hallelujah,” which is now his most famous song by quite a lot, is awkward and heretical and horny all at once. When all those singers record it for their Christmas albums, you can really hear them put the blinders on to pretend that the point is the “hallelujah” and not all of the words that come before and after.

And yet on “Anthem,” that line—the one I got as a tattoo on a weird day in 2012—is straightforward and elegant, its meaning not obscure in the least. You could put it on a throw pillow, and it would mean the same thing to pretty much everyone who walked by the sofa.

And yet that doesn’t rob it of any of its power. I don’t feel corny for wearing that sentiment on my arm, even though I just checked and you can literally buy a throw pillow with those words on it on Amazon*, because they’re just so fundamentally true. The things we see that appear to be broken have light that shines through them. The things that make us feel broken make us beautiful.

I think part of why that’s the case is because “Anthem” is so hard-fought. It took Leonard Cohen ten years to write, which is not all that unusual for him, and it is not cheap sentiment. He’s not the first person to express something similar—Groucho Marx once remarked, “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light”—but he is the one who put it in this context, who acknowledged what kind of cracks we are talking about. When I hear “Anthem,” or when I look down at my arm, for that matter, what I hear is that you don’t need to be in denial about anything that you know to be true.

I have never found it comforting to ignore the things I find distressing. I’m not big on looking for a way to take my mind off of whatever is bothering me. Doing that doesn’t feel like doing anything useful. It feels like a way to make sure that, at some point, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with all of my distractions gone, and be forced to confront whatever it was like a monster that’s been chasing me. Real hope, to me, comes from looking at the world as it is, and then choosing to try to make choices to embrace the best parts of it, the things that you want to be true. To try to make them just a little more true, if you can. To ring the bells that still can ring, and to trust that the light will shine through the cracks in what’s left.

*please don’t