In the Human Frame

When I went to university in Montreal in the early 2000s, my friends and I would often meet in the Portuguese Man Park, as we called the Parc du Portugal, the little square on the Main that hosted daily minglings of pigeons and greybeards, whose most revered inhabitant was the spirit if not the fact of Leonard “September” Cohen, as he liked to call himself. Nodding at the big stone house on the corner, we’d say, “That’s Leonard’s house,” as knowingly as if he’d once welcomed us in for a chat. If only. We didn’t really know his work, hadn’t read his novels (though perhaps a few poems). Certainly, we’d tried to teach ourselves guitar with the easy chords of “Hallelujah,” maybe hummed a few strains of that one about the river, and given as an epigraph to the incredibly earnest creative writing collection we put together in 2003 or 2004 that ubiquitous line about how the crack in everything lets the light get in. The comfort we took in Cohen went beyond our knowledge of what he...