To me this song is about the end of an intense relationship with someone who is deeply embedded in your life, and the ways we try to use our minds to rationalize the end when sometimes there is no reason. It's about the human tendency to scramble for answers and to neatly fit life and heartbreak into tidy boxes that we can understand better. It's about looking in hindsight after the end of the relationship and wondering if the love was even real, if they even really loved you and confronting our tendency to diminish or explain away what cannot be explained: "Do not say the moment was imagined, Do not stoop to strategies like this," and "Do not choose a coward's explanation, That hides behind the cause and the effect." This is one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs and it has been my salve through time of deep sadness.
To me this song is about the end of an intense relationship with someone who is deeply embedded in your life, and the ways we try to use our minds to rationalize the end when sometimes there is no reason. It's about the human tendency to scramble for answers and to neatly fit life and heartbreak into tidy boxes that we can understand better. It's about looking in hindsight after the end of the relationship and wondering if the love was even real, if they even really loved you and confronting our tendency to diminish or explain away what cannot be explained: "Do not say the moment was imagined, Do not stoop to strategies like this," and "Do not choose a coward's explanation, That hides behind the cause and the effect." This is one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs and it has been my salve through time of deep sadness.