Saturday 12 November 2016

David Remnick from The New Yorker: last interview with Leonard Cohen

This is a beautiful interview. Perhaps, not so much an interview as a testimony.

I hope this doesn't sound too glib, but I honestly believe a major strength of Leonard Cohen was his preparedness and ability to hold paradoxical contradictions in tension as, perhaps, only a poet can do: life, death; sex, love and loneliness; dark and light; brokenness and healing; guilt, melancholy and humorous self-deprecation; relentlessly seeking God, banging on God's door which for the longest time seemed to be closed; and then, at the end of his life, in his "white-knuckle" pain, relaxing into "hearing God speaking" - no longer in judgement, but compassionately: "Eat something, you're losing too much weight."