Leonard Cohen is a man who lived with inner anguish, but did so gallantly. He celebrated the melancholy of life. He planted the truth of our existence (we die, my friends!) before us without apology. He wrestled with all this, but, again, without apology.
In the wake of his recent passing, you might like to catch up on how he took five years (unapologetically) to write Hallelujah.
And to revisit his beautiful line about how we have to become the ocean to avoid being seasick.
The New Yorker published a heart-soaring longread about Cohen and his brave confrontation of darkness recently. I liked lots in it. But this bit stuck with me:
“Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said…
“He wanted to reach ‘inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists’.”
The line is perfectly evocative. All six cohorts share the same desperate, grasping and well-meaning pain. All search for love and come up with… death.