The Traitor Lyrics

Lyric discussion by Georgeb 

Cover art for The Traitor lyrics by Leonard Cohen

Well I guess, it is fundamentally positive, and for a long time I just amaze myself at the beauty of the methaphore, the idea of the world as a stage, as the scene of a quest, in which the spectators are the judges as well, then i heard Leonard Cohen's explaantion of the line of thought that made him write the poem. It goes like this:

“It was called “The traitor”. It was about the feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill, and being unable to fulfill it, and then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it, and that the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself”. It talks about the unvoidable predicament of failure from without, and the only right posture when one's faced with a situation in which one cannot but fail: standing guiltless, in the predicament in which you find yourself. I think that is positive: not blaming yourself for outcomes of which you could not fully control.