Franklin Matters: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in"

Monday, April 13, 2020

"There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in"

The tweet contained this quote which caught my attention:

Vulnerability isn't generally the mode that is most welcome in this world, and even people who say they love Leonard Cohen's line, "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in," tend to spend most of their time furiously hiding their own cracks from public display.

https://twitter.com/elamin88/status/1248989058195488770?s=19

So I followed the link to the article to begin reading:

Our apartment window has become a television screen, and we’ve started to name the people we can see when we look out of it, as if they’re characters in a new and still-captivating show. There’s Bruce Wayne, and the Lady with the Floofy Cats, and – dearest to my heart – Shouty French Dad. SFD appears to have approximately 10 children, all of them boys, all of them requiring cheetah levels of exercise every day.

A couple of months ago, in the before-time, I used to roll my eyes at SFD when I heard him yelling at his many children in multiple languages (it did not occur to me, until this moment, that he could probably hear me screaming at my own). Now that’s all changed. He’s still shouty, but I recognize what a good dad he is, as he ties the shoes of the little ones with ragged patience, and plays soccer with the older ones after they leave the apartment for their one hour of prison-yard exercise.

He’s doing the best he can. Or maybe he’s secretly sinking. It’s hard to judge, since the great pandemic see-saw is no respecter of emotional equilibrium. It might see you coping one day, and sobbing in the bathroom behind a locked door the next. What everyone does feel, it seems to me, is raw. Raw and human and fallible, open to the possibilities of catastrophe and grace, all at once.