Purposive Drift

How the light gets in

My friend Gill Wildman pointed me to a column by Howard Jacobson in the Independent, which in turn led me to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's "Anthem". In an earlier post I asked, "Where is the light?" Well maybe Cohen's lyrics points to the kind of places to look:

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."

Which in turn reminded me of a quote from Theodore Zeldin I have used before:

"Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulty of existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable. The fact that the world has become fuller than ever of complexity of every kind may suggest at first that it is harder to find a way out of our dilemmas, but in reality the more complexities, the more crevices there through which we can crawl."

So cracks and crevices it is then.