I once heard that Hemingway said we’re all broken, that’s how the light gets in, which is lovely, but Hemingway never said it. What Hemingway said was the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places, which is also quite inspirational except Hemingway went on to say, rather darkly, those that will not break, it kills and, I’m paraphrasing now, the world kills everyone impartially no matter how good or gentle or brave. Later, it was another great poet, Leonard Cohen, who said there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Twenty years after that, some lady merged the quotes together in a tweet. But this absurd game of telephone actually started eight hundred years ago with the Sufi mystic Rumi who wrote something beautiful about a wound, and that was, Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you. And it should be noted that Emerson first said the thing about a crack in an essay in 1841. He wrote there is a crack in every thing God has made, but he left it at that without any hope of light getting in there. But, after all of that, it was Chumbawumba who made the best point because it doesn’t matter so much about cracks or light as long as, after you get knocked down, broken or not, you get up again.
Copyright ©2017 by Angie Tonucci. All rights reserved.