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and again. It illustrates beautifully both how difficult the examined life can be, and why it is so worthwhile to continue to strive after it.

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    The Existential Cohen
    A GUST M AGNUSSON
    T hey call him the “High Priest of Pathos,” “Grand Master of Melancholia,” and the amazingly awesome “Spin Doctor for the Apocalypse.” The stereotypical image of Leonard Cohen is that of a man primarily concerned with the darker aspects of the human condition. The enormous (and hilarious) array of aliases given to him by the press mostly label him as an artist whose stock-in-trade seemingly consists of little else than making people feel miserable.
    This popular conception of Cohen as a peddler of doom has always bothered his devotees, and rightly so, for what is immediately apparent to anyone with ears to truly hear Cohen’s music and poetry is that there’s an immense amount of grace, beauty, and joy to be found in his songs. In fact, one might say that the darkness in his works (and there is, indeed, a great deal of darkness) throws into sharp relief the light that permeates human existence. This may be why it’s so common to hear people speak of Cohen’s music as a source of healing and comfort in times of suffering and despair, which is the exact opposite of the Cohen cliché perpetuated in popular culture which mostly evokes images of unhappy and angst-ridden depressives wallowing in their pain.
    Even though Cohen has been famously hesitant to admit to any cohesive philosophy behind his artistic output he has, on more than one occasion, alluded to this fundamental elementof finding the light in the darkness as a kind of spiritual signpost for a great deal of his work. This philosophy is perhaps most explicitly articulated in the chorus of the beautiful song “Anthem” which appears on Cohen’s 1992 masterpiece The Future : “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” In an interview given shortly after the album’s release Cohen said that these lines are “The closest thing I can describe to a credo. That idea is one of the foundations, one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs” (“Sincerely, L. Cohen”).
    This notion of the light coming in through the cracks in many ways goes against the prevailing philosophy of our age which tells us that we are to fill up the cracks as best we can, no matter the cost. Cohen’s insistence in “Anthem” that we must forget our “perfect offering” stands in stark contrast to a culture where one’s value as a human being is measured by material success and the extent to which we have attained a perfection (physical and otherwise) which is, ultimately, unattainable. Many people fall prey to depression, drug addiction, and sometimes even suicide in their attempt to fit into predefined societal norms which have little or nothing to do with who they truly are, reminding us that no sacrifice is too great on the altar of perfection.
    Cohen’s artistic output is, in many ways, a rebellious cry against this point of view, a celebration of the beautiful losers (as his second novel was so aptly titled), those who resign themselves to the brokenness and suffering of the human condition and in doing so find great reserves of compassion, goodness, grace, and joy.
    This notion of finding compassion through suffering, life through death, is a central philosophical tenet in almost all of the great spiritual traditions. Zen Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity all contain a great deal of wisdom on the insight so beautifully conveyed by Cohen in “Anthem,” and all three of these traditions have been deep sources of inspiration and guidance for Cohen’s art and life. I will not be focusing on these religious sources of inspiration for Cohen (some ofwhich are covered elsewhere in this book) but would instead like to use the next few pages to examine a different parallel to Cohen’s thought on this subject, one which is found in the