You Have Loved Enough

I never get tired of three or four of Leonard Cohen’s works on his Ten New Songs album. I enjoyed this album the very first time I heard it, and it seems to grow on me every time I listen to it again. That seems impossible, considering how much I have enjoyed it in the past. But tonight, while reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and sitting in a most comfortable easy chair, I found myself really listening to the album again, and being struck again, in a different way, how unbelievably good Leonard was/is. I had headphones on and maybe that’s why I heard things in Leonard Cohen’s voice I felt I had not heard before. It is absolutely amazing. It is not just the phrasing, and it certainly is not the words. I have listened to Ten New Songs a hundred times. But for some reason I was most sensitive to the music tonight and it sounded, especially on some songs, as if Leonard was actually singing privately to the woman he once loved, to a woman who was no longer there.

Listening to the album I find myself once again transported to an oversized bed on the second floor of a large house at the top of a hill overlooking the Nidd Valley. It’s 2:00 a.m. and I am marking the hours listening to the BBC 2 chimes. It is indescribably black, the middle of the night, but soon it will be dawn and it will be over.

I said I would be your lover. You laughed at what I said. I lost my job forever. I was counted with the dead. I swept the marble chambers, but you sent me down below. You kept me from believing until you let me know that I am not the one who loves, it’s love that seizes me. When hatred with his package comes, you forbid delivery. And when the hunger for your touch rises from the hunger, you whisper,  “You have loved enough. Now let me be the lover.” And when the hunger for your touch rises from the hunger, you whisper, “You have loved enough. Now let me be the lover.”

I swept the marble chamber but you sent me down below. You kept me from believing until you let me know that I am not the one who loves, no, it’s love that chooses me. When hatred with his package comes, you forbid delivery. And when the hunger for your touch rises from the hunger, you whisper, “You have loved enough. Now let me be the lover.” And when the hunger for your touch rises from the hunger, you whisper “You have loved enough. Now let me be the lover.”

And that’s the whole song. And I can listen to it a million times.