How We Remember Leonard Cohen

The death of Leonard Cohen was not a tragedy. He was eighty-two and loved ones were near. He’d been working at a gallop, producing three albums over his last six years—three of his finest, as it happens. He’d recovered from financial ruin by touring the world, selling out colossal venues, performing long enough some nights to rival Bruce Springsteen. And, as always, he’d been writing—“blackening pages,” exercising the vocation that had occupied him since his youth and won him accolades since the publication of his first book of poetry in 1956. So no tragedy, yet Cohen’s fall through the mirror was nonetheless devastating to many. Perhaps because Cohen’s work possesses a highly particular ability to mirror the experience of those who respond to it. One could argue that much of Cohen’s art was self-absorbed, yet it nevertheless seemed to speak directly, intimately, to us, as though by examining his own inner life with such unflinching rigour he’d...