Interviewer: In other song you also say"There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in". It is not a very happy thought to believe that something will always have to break, to open a crack, in order to the light gets in...
Leonard Cohen: It is a happy thought if we enjoy the truth. There is always something that will have to break. Usually it is our personal proud.
A Buddhist thinker said that disappointment is a great way to illumination. Other masters said: "from the broken débris of my heart I will erect an altar to the Lord".
The idea that there is a staircase of gold and marble, which leads to knowledge is seductive, but seems to me that the idea of something needing to get broken before we can learn anything is a more true idea. It is my experience, maybe you can escape it, but I doubt it. Unless the heart breaks, we will never know anything about love. As long as our objective universe don't collapse, we'll never know anything about the world.
We think that we know the mechanism, but only when it falls we understand how intricate and mysterious is the operation. So, it is true, "there's a crack in everything", all human activity is imperfect and unfinished. Only that way we can have the notion that there's something inside us that can only be located through disillusion, bad luck and defeat. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case.
(excerpt of an interview with Leonard Cohen conducted by João Lisboa for Expresso 1994)
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