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Buddhism!”
    And so, as time passes, I really do begin to feel I am watching a complex man trying to come clear, a still jangled, sometimes angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm. As day passes into night and day again, he comes into focus, and out again, like the sun behind clouds, now blazing with a lucent, high intensity, now more like the difficult brooder you might imagine from the records. “He’s a tiger,” I remember a woman in New York telling me, “a very complicated man. Complicated in a very grown-up way. I mean, he makes Dylan seem childish.” The first time she met him, she explained, he congratulated her on a book she’d written. As their meal went on, he added, “Your writing is a lot more interesting than you are.”
    Cruelty has always been as disconcerting a part of his package as perversity. Yet when I talked to the people who tour with him I felt I was speaking to the Apostles. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as gracious, as graceful, as generous as Leonard,” said Perla Batalla, who has been singing with him for eight years. “Once I’d been out on the road with Leonard, I couldn’t go out with anyone else.” His other backup singer, Julie Christensen, left a newborn baby at home to go out on tour with him—having seen her friends who’d been in his band come back “changed, philosophically changed, really on this kind of heightened awareness level.” His longtime accompanist, Jennifer Warnes, even recorded a whole album of Cohen songs she wanted to re-bring before the public.
    All of them talk of how Cohen the singer seems of a piece with Cohen the Zen practitioner, making them sing and sing and sing the same song till sometimes they’ll break into tears, and wearing them out with his indefatigable three-hour, twelve-encore concerts. But all speak of his tours as if they were a kind of spiritual training. “He’ll give the same attention to the president of the country or to someone who’s just walked up to him on the street,” says Batalla, recalling how he rode on the bus like just another technician. Others mention his racing off to buy aspirin for them when they’re sick, or inviting them to his hotel room at night to drink hot chocolate made with water from the sink.
    “In the ancient concert halls of Europe,” says Christensen, “you got this feeling that you’d really have to run if you weren’t telling the truth. It was a mystery bigger than me, and if I’d figured it out, I would be bigger than it.” Then, almost sheepishly, she adds, “I thought that kind of thing was corny before I toured with Leonard.” Batalla sometimes visits his home just to sit in absolute silence with her boss.
    And so the days on the mountain go on, and every day at dawn young monks with clean, pure faces appear at my door with trays of food, and every day, when I visit Cohen in his cabin, he gives me green tea in a wineglass, or shows me paintings—flowing nudes and haggard self-portraits—he’s done on his computer, or reads me poems about the dissolution of self from a book he is putting together, which, like all his best work, sound like love songs or prayers or both, addressed to a goddess or to God.
    One morning, in his bathroom, I come upon
The Shambhala
Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen.
    “I like the fact they distinguish between Buddhism and Zen,” he says when I come out.
    “What is the difference?”
    He disappears—good Zen solution—into the bathroom to clean cups.
    Another day, as the retreat is drawing to a close, the sky above my window grey and shriven and severe, he shows up with his hands dirty from fixing his toilet, and I try to get him to talk about his writing. “For me,” he says, his voice soft and beautiful, with a trace of Canada still hiding inside it, “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s