Leonard Cohen from Rolling Stone, Dec. 15-29, 2016

Leonard Cohen: the life and legacy of the poet of brokenness, by Mikal Gilmore

I am not recopying the entire, long, well-written article, but I wanted to cite the full credit from the table of contents for future reference. This, though, was the final paragraph, and I do want to keep it.

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"This sounds like the most hackneyed 19th-century platitude," Cohen once told me, "but in the midst of my own tiny personal troubles, I turned to the thing I knew how to do and I made songs out of it, and in the making of those songs, much of the pain was dissolved. That is one of the things that art does, is that it heals. A man who makes those choices in his own life is often more beautiful than his works. Any artist who remains true to himself becomes a work of art himself, because that is one of the most difficult things to do. If someone does have that vocation, and diligently applies himself to the exigencies that arise, he will lose a great deal but he will have created his own character."

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I like this. It's a full, rich description of a concept I find appealing. Of course, I am equally happy to just think of the lyrics from the song "Art Class (song for Yayoi Kusama)" by Superchunk:

"Why so serious? When it's only your life that's at stake.
Why so serious? When your life is the art that you make.
Your life is the art that you make."