One hot summer day in 2001, I drove down to the modest duplex Leonard Cohen shared with his daughter, Lorca, in a beat-up, largely forgotten part of L.A. When I pulled up on the quiet street of simple homes, it was to find Cohen sitting on the sidewalk in a three-piece suit in the sweltering afternoon. In front of him sat an overturned computer in the gutter—“Yesterday’s drama,” he said, with characteristic wryness. Then he led me past the little house, into the backyard, and up a flight of stairs, and I found myself inside a makeshift recording studio that he’d dubbed, with scrupulous irony, “Small Mercies.”
He started to tell me about the latest turns in his inner life—intimacy would always be his gift, in person and in art—and confessed that he’d begun traveling to India to listen to a retired bank manager talk about the place beyond all dualities. “Every kind of seeker was there, in the little room,” Cohen said. “Seekers who’d tried everything, seekers of last resort.” Neither of us could forget that, six years earlier, he’d told me that he could never go to India because—“forgive me”—he couldn’t live with disorder.