In much the same way that my brother’s visit inspired me to pick up Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for Peoplein a Hurry the Winter Olympics pushed me to move The Holy or the Broken up my to read pile. There were several figure skaters who performed to some version of “Hallelujah” and I’ve always had an interest in this iconoclast of a song, so the book was already on its way to me by happenstance (it was however delayed by over 20 days in arriving […]
“What’s life for?”
Shortly after Leonard Cohen died, I was wandering through a Half-Price Books when I stumbled upon a couple of his books of poetry. I picked up 2006’s Book of Longing as tribute to the artist. Fortuitously, NPR’s Terry Gross recently re-released a 2006 interview with Cohen about this very book. I listened to the interview concurrently with my own reading and wrestling with the text. The context for the book that the interview provided was helpful: Cohen wrote a large chunk of Longing while living at a Zen […]