Sun After Dark Read Online Free PDF

horrible and I’m in it. And it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful”—you can hear the cadences of his songs here—“and yet there’s something inevitable about it.” But most of the writers he admires, preempting one’s criticism again, “are just incredible messes, as human beings. Wonderful and invigorating company, but I pity their wives and their husbands and their children.”
    A crooked smile.
    As for the songs, “I’ve always held the song in high regard,” he says, “because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.” Sometimes, he goes on, holding me with his commanding eloquence, his ill-shaven baritone compounded of Gauloises, Courvoisier, and a lifetime of late nights, he’ll catch a snatch of one of his songs on the radio, “and I’ll think: these songs are really good. And it’s really wonderful that they have been written, and more wonderful that they should have found a place in the heart. And sometimes I’ll hear my voice, and I’ll think: this guy has got to be the great comedian of his generation. These are hilarious: hilariously inept, hilariously solemn and out of keeping with the times; hilariously inappropriate.”
    A line he’s used for years, I know, but still more than you’d expect from a man whose songs are covered by Willie Nelson and Billy Joel. “To me,” he continues, scraping at his sneakers with a knife, “the kind of thing I like is that you write a song, and it slips into the world, and they forget who wrote it. And it moves and it changes, and you hear it again three hundred years later, some women washing their clothes in a stream, and one of them is humming this tune.” His conversation like the outline of a ballad.
    At last, as the 168 hours come to an end, I walk up the mountain to join the students in what will be their final session of
zazen,
the stars above the pines thicker than I have seen in thirty years of living in Southern California. By now, nearly all of them are exhausted to the point of breakdown—or breakthrough—some of them with open wounds on their feet, others nodding off at every turn, still others lit up and charged as electrical wires.
    And then, at two in the morning, on the longest night of the year, suddenly the silence breaks, and people talk, and laugh, and return to being maths professors and doctors and writers again as they collect the letters that have been accumulating for them, and drink tea, and, in the great exhalation, I can hear a woman saying, in exultation, in relief, “Better than drugs!”
    In his sepulchral cabin, Cohen breaks out the cognac and serves an old friend and me gefilte fish, Hebrew National salami, and egg-and-onion matzohs from a box. The two of them look like battle-hardened veterans—“non-commissioned officers,” as the friend says—and it’s not hard to see how this celebrated lady-killer called an early backup band “The Army” and one of his sweetest records “an anti-pacifist recording.”
    Yet even at his most ragged here, he seems a long way away from the one who cried out, so pitifully, on his 1973 live album, “I can’t stand who I am.” Leonard Cohen has always seemed, or tried, to inhabit a higher zone of sorts, and one that his parable-like songs, his alchemical symbols, and his constant harking back to Abraham and David and Isaac only compound. In trying to marry Babylon with Bethlehem, in reading women’s bodies with the obsessiveness of a Talmudic scholar, in giving North America a raffish tilt so that he’s always been closer to Jacques Brel or Georges Moustaki than to Bob Dylan, he’s been trying, over and over, to find ceremony without sanctimony and discipline without dogma. Where else should he be, where else could he be, than in a military-style ritualized training that allows him to put Old Testament words to a country-and-western beat and write songs that sound like first-person