It's Justin's birthday tomorrow, and this post will be developed to reflect and celebrate this anniversary, so much better than we could have anticipated just under a year ago when we were first told of his condition.
Meantime, for various reasons I have had cause to think of birthdays towards the end of life, as well as the beginning, and of the consolations of age and experience (The Autumn leaves have got you thinkin', about the first time that you fell...). Physically, there are precious few of these, perhaps none: there is no upside of the loss of health and vitality. Intellectually and emotionally, things are not much better: growing old sucks, and pandering talk of greater wisdom and broadening perspective is just so much pap to help us keep down the bile of wasted time.
And yet, as long as there is this...there is still hope. Some poets fade like everyone else, or grow sour, but Leonard Cohen really seems to get better with every year, every poem, and this is perhaps the best so far.
The only sadness is—to use the title of a song composed in tribute to a singer-songwriter that has not aged so well at all (Don McLean)—is that Cohen is 'killing me softly with his song': after hearing this, further creation seems futile, there is nothing that I could ever write that would come close to capturing the sublime with such simplicity ('so elegant, and cheap').
Meantime, for various reasons I have had cause to think of birthdays towards the end of life, as well as the beginning, and of the consolations of age and experience (The Autumn leaves have got you thinkin', about the first time that you fell...). Physically, there are precious few of these, perhaps none: there is no upside of the loss of health and vitality. Intellectually and emotionally, things are not much better: growing old sucks, and pandering talk of greater wisdom and broadening perspective is just so much pap to help us keep down the bile of wasted time.
And yet, as long as there is this...there is still hope. Some poets fade like everyone else, or grow sour, but Leonard Cohen really seems to get better with every year, every poem, and this is perhaps the best so far.
The only sadness is—to use the title of a song composed in tribute to a singer-songwriter that has not aged so well at all (Don McLean)—is that Cohen is 'killing me softly with his song': after hearing this, further creation seems futile, there is nothing that I could ever write that would come close to capturing the sublime with such simplicity ('so elegant, and cheap').
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