Leonard Cohen On Children

Leonard Cohen with his children, Adam & Lorca

Leonard Cohen And His Children

Leonard Cohen has consistently criticized  his own parental skills:

I have never been a good civilian. my children like me. But the truth is that I tried to be a good father and husband, but I was not very good.¹

Nonetheless, he has just as consistently expressed his affection, admiration, and appreciation for his son, Adam, and his daughter, Lorca. Posting a few of these moments and his thoughts on childhood in general seemed an appropriate way to celebrate the recent birth of his granddaughter, Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen.

Leonard Cohen On Children Undermining Loneliness

Valerie Pringle’s 1997 CTV interview with Leonard Cohen was originally posted in its entirety at  Leonard Cohen On Zen, Depression, Women, Children, Headhunters, Loneliness, & Tennis.  The video below automatically starts at the beginning of the segment pertinent to having children.

Leonard Cohen, Interview 1997, Part 1 of 2

My Mother Asleep, Leonard Cohen

remembering my mother
at a theatre in Athens
thirty
thirty-five years ago
a revue by Theodorakis
those great songs
she fell asleep
in the chair beside mine
in the open-air theatre
she had arrived that day
from Montreal
and the play started close to midnight
and she slept through
the mandolins
the climbing harmonies
and the great songs
I was young
I hadn’t had my children
I didn’t know how far away
your love could be
I didn’t know how
tired you could get

Leonard Cohen On Teaching Children Good Manners Rather Than Discipline

… the epoch, the era, the time that I grew up, psychological profiles were not fashionable. You just followed orders, more or less, and whatever you could do on the sly you did. But it was a pretty disciplined kind of existence when I was a kid. There wasn’t the kind of youth rebellion that we see today, and authority and parental control were very strong, and nobody cared what your inner condition was as long as your shoes were underneath your bed in the right way… yeah. No, we weren’t close to our parents, we didn’t really discuss our inner condition with our parents. It was a very wise kind of upbringing, it didn’t invite self-indulgence. … You learned good manners, you know, which is better than discipline.²

Leonard Cohen On Losing The Sense Of Childhood Wonder

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.³

Leonard Cohen On The Blessings Received From Mature, Independent Children

This video opens with a discussion of Cohen’s fiscal woes following the loss of his retirement funds, which provides context for the description of his son’s response to the situation.

Leonard Cohen & Anjani Thomas at Først & sist, NRK, 2007, part 2 of 3

Video from kaarekjohnsen

.

1. Magazine, Sunday Supplement to El Mundo, September 26, 2001 [↩]
2. Leonard Cohen, Interview with Stina Lundberg, Paris 2001 [↩]
3. Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game [↩]