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laments written by God?
    “I feel,” says Cohen a little later, when we’re alone, “we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood: a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior—at this point it’s more devastating on the interior level—but it’s leaking into the real world. And this Flood is of such enormous and biblical proportions that I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”
    Of course, he says, impatiently, he can’t explain what he’s doing here. “I don’t think anybody really knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, ‘Where are you going—in the deepest sense of the word?’ you can’t really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of ‘What else would I be doing?’ Do I want to be Frank Sinatra, who’s really great, and do I want to have great retrospectives of my work? I’m not really interested in being the oldest folksinger around.
    “Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Well, I hated it when it was going on”—signs of the snarl beneath the chuckle—“so maybe I would feel better about it now. But I don’t think so.
    “What would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.
    “I think that’s the real deep entertainment,” he concludes. “Religion. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available to us is within this activity. Nothing touches it.” He smiles his godfatherly smile. “Except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement.”
    Before I leave, he catches my eye, and his voice turns soft.
    “We are gathered here,” he says, “around a very, very old man, who may outlive all of us, and who may go tomorrow. So that gives an urgency to the practice. Everybody, including Roshi, is practicing with a kind of passionate diligence. It touches my heart. It makes me proud to be part of this community.”
    Before I leave the following morning, the
roshi
invites me, with Cohen, to his cabin for lunch. It’s a typically eclectic meal, of noodles and curry, taken quietly and simply, in a small sunlit dining area. As ever when the
roshi
is around, Cohen sits absolutely humble and silent in one corner, all the tension emptied out of his face; everything about him is light, like a clear glass once the liquid’s drained.
    He tells me a little about how he was once fascinated by Persian miniatures. He talks of the intensity of “living in a world of samples.” He cleans up around the kitchen, and asks his old friend, very gently, if he’s tired. When we go out into the parking lot, a woman comes up and starts telling him how much his songs have meant to her, and Cohen gives her his warmest smile and leaves her with a kind of blessing. “A practice like this,” he tells me, “and I think everyone here would say the same thing, you could only do for love.”
    “So if it weren’t for the
roshi,
you wouldn’t be here?” I ask.
    “If it weren’t for the
roshi,
I wouldn’t be.”
    And as I set off down the mountain—listening with new ears now to the old songs, and seeing the shadow of an old Japanese man behind the love songs and the ballads about “the few who forgive what you do and the fewer who don’t even care”—I realize that the whole stay