Pico Iyer, Leonard Cohen and Etty Hillesum: Masters of the Journey, Servants and Celebrants of Life
PATRICK S. WOLFE
In his 2025 book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, Pico Iyer often illuminates the beauty and sanctity “of clarity and silence” with stories about fellow-travellers, including two of my heroes.[1]
Etty Hillesum, 1939. Photo restored using Artificial Intelligence. Original photo: Rob Bogaerts. Wikimedia Commons.
“Did you read Etty Hillesum?” Pico asks Leonard Cohen toward the end of one of their visits.
Leonard answers in his courtly way that he hasn’t had “the privilege.”[2]
By heroes, I mean those rare, avatar-like individuals whom you know something about, something both factual and deeper than every-day reality that resonates with the feeling—and perhaps some of the meaning—of hidden truths.
Pico is confounded by Etty’s remarkable spiritual transformation during the 32.5 months prior to her murder at Auschwitz on Nov. 30, 1943, when she was 29, a transformation which occurred in the context of the Nazi persecution of the Netherlands’ Jews that saw seventy-three per cent of that population annihilated.[3] He’s confounded by the “astonishing wisdom and confidence,” and the “clarity and conviction,” she came to possess, as exhibited in her diary and letters and by people’s recollections of her.[4] Her story makes him give up his “simple ideas of what sacrifice means, or justice.”[5]
“It’s something she says. ‘Kneeling can be more intimate than sex,’” he tells Leonard.[6]
Etty’s words date from November 1941, only eight months after her diary’s opening entry, which includes this sentence: “I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside me something is still locked away.”[7] To Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Etty’s writings are “a Confessions of St Augustine for our own times.”[8]
Since the original publication, first in Dutch, then in English, in the early 1980s, of Etty’s diary and a few of her letters, her reputation has grown by leaps and bounds.[9] In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI pronounced her a woman “transfigured by faith” despite her earlier years as a “frail and dissatisfied young woman” who had led a “restless life.”[10]
In Bombay, at seventeen, Pico listened repeatedly to Leonard’s famous early songs “Suzanne” and “So long, Marianne.”[11] Desire, Pico writes, got Leonard into his “deepest trouble.”[12] Leonard’s songwriting, according to Pico, is a “Buddhist practice” that picks apart “every inconstancy” and reminds us to live calmly with all that we cannot control.[13]
A life-long Jew, Leonard explored other spiritual systems, particularly Buddhism. In the mid-1990s, he lived at the Mount Baldy Monastery and Zen Center, east of Los Angeles, where he was personal assistant to Buddhist monk and Roshi (venerable master) Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, who was then in his late eighties.[14] Pico, during a visit, described Leonard as “an anonymous grunt” who scrubbed floors, cooked for the abbot and drove him to the doctor. Speaking of this experience, Leonard tells Pico that he’s found freedom from answers and questions, “A landscape without doubt.”[15]
Pico was born in Feb. 1957, two generations after Etty in Jan. 1914 and one after Leonard in Sept. 1934. He relates the story of a “sixty-six-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk of my boyhood” who set himself on fire in Saigon. The monk was protesting a crackdown on religion, “but even more, perhaps,” Pico writes, providing a reminder “that death might not be the enemy of life.”[16]
Etty did not have to die at Auschwitz, but she was predisposed to engage and bear witness to what life served up. On July 15, 1942, she was given a job at the Amsterdam Jewish Council. It came with an exemption from deportation, which was meant to keep her safe. But two weeks later she volunteered to go to Westerbork, a concentration camp in Drenthe province and the last stop before the death camps in the east, to provide support for Jews in transit. Worried friends repeatedly offered to help her escape and go into hiding. She always refused.[17]
“Events have become too overwhelming and too demonic to be stemmed with personal resentment and bitterness,” she wrote on July 11, 1942. “People often get worked up when I say it doesn’t really matter whether I go or somebody else does, the main thing is that so many thousands have to go. It is not as if I want to fall into the arms of destruction…. I am only bowing to the inevitable, and even as I do so I am sustained by the certain knowledge that ultimately they cannot rob us of anything that matters. But I don’t think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer.”[18]
A week on, Etty observed, “there is only one way of preparing the new age, by living it even now in our hearts.”[19] Her diary’s last entry was composed three months later. Its last sentence is a quiet exhortation: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”[20] Writing in Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, Patrick Woodhouse says Etty became “a universal person, seeking to be in communion with all peoples across all boundaries.”[21]
This universal person designation could apply as well to Leonard and Pico for their approaches to bearing witness and giving expression to that witness. Leonard’s is a rapturous case. When his business manager stole most of his money, financial necessity forced his return to the stage, which proved to be a late-in-life renaissance and a transcendent experience for audiences around the world. From 2008 through the end of 2013, he and the musicians who accompanied him played 380 shows.[22]
The actor Gabriel Byrne, who played Leonard in the 2020 film “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” attended the last concert the poet-troubadour gave in Dublin. “I think everybody there felt that it was more of a religious experience than a concert,” Byrne said, adding: “You felt like he was channelling something deep through himself to the audience.”[23]
Leonard exuded humility and gratitude in front of those audiences, but he also acknowledged reactions like that of Byrne. “I start with artistic dedication,” he said in one of his last interviews. “I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on other human receptors…. If you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is in a particularly salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.”[24]
Leonard’s “gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,” Bob Dylan has said.[25]
Those concerts, which saw the transformation of solitary songwriting into virtuoso performance, were joyous celebrations of community and the human experience. They were a collective and deeply appreciative acknowledgement of devotion, discipline and experience distilled into poetry and song. Composing “Hallelujah” took five years, “Anthem” took ten[26] and “Treaty,” from “You Want It Darker,” took seven.[27]
Unlike Leonard and Pico, Etty did not have the opportunity of extended time to age into wisdom. Yet she maintained, “All of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go,”[28] a perspective Pico echoes when he writes about the longing that many people feel. It’s a longing, a monk friend tells him, that can also become “the ecstasy.”[29]
Pico, Etty, Leonard: Each of their lives is a mystical testament to Leonard’s lyric from “Anthem” that There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
On April 30, 1942, the day the Nazis decreed that Dutch Jews must wear the yellow star, Etty’s diary response was: “Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never, give up.”[30]
This need to bear, and to witness, the human condition with stark honesty is something Pico understands, and Leonard did too. According to Pico, Leonard’s songs illuminate “a struggle in which words like ‘happiness’ and ‘sadness’ are beside the point.” His music tells us, “the only thing you can believe in… is a reality you can’t comprehend.”[31]
Iyer, 147 (“It confounds me…”). Patrick Woodhouse, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, xi (“just two and a half years”); I date the 32.5 months from Etty’s first diary entry on March 9, 1941. Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors, The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945, Arnold, London, 1997, 2 (seventy-three per cent). ↑
Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943 (sic) and Letters from Westerbork, with Foreword by Eva Hoffman, First Holt Paperbacks edition, New York, 1996, 61 (“Such things [kneeling] are often more intimate even than sex.”), 3 “I am accomplished in bed…”). ↑
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, “Forward” to Woodhouse, ix. ↑
Pico Iyer, Leonard Cohen and Etty Hillesum: Masters of the Journey, Servants and Celebrants of Life
Pico Iyer, Leonard Cohen and Etty Hillesum: Masters of the Journey, Servants and Celebrants of Life
PATRICK S. WOLFE
In his 2025 book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, Pico Iyer often illuminates the beauty and sanctity “of clarity and silence” with stories about fellow-travellers, including two of my heroes.[1]
Pico Iyer, Feb. 8, 2012. Author: kellywritershouse. Wikimedia Commons.
Leonard Cohen, Geneva concert, Oct. 27, 2008. Author: Rama. Wikimedia Commons.
Etty Hillesum, 1939. Photo restored using Artificial Intelligence. Original photo: Rob Bogaerts. Wikimedia Commons.
“Did you read Etty Hillesum?” Pico asks Leonard Cohen toward the end of one of their visits.
Leonard answers in his courtly way that he hasn’t had “the privilege.”[2]
By heroes, I mean those rare, avatar-like individuals whom you know something about, something both factual and deeper than every-day reality that resonates with the feeling—and perhaps some of the meaning—of hidden truths.
Pico is confounded by Etty’s remarkable spiritual transformation during the 32.5 months prior to her murder at Auschwitz on Nov. 30, 1943, when she was 29, a transformation which occurred in the context of the Nazi persecution of the Netherlands’ Jews that saw seventy-three per cent of that population annihilated.[3] He’s confounded by the “astonishing wisdom and confidence,” and the “clarity and conviction,” she came to possess, as exhibited in her diary and letters and by people’s recollections of her.[4] Her story makes him give up his “simple ideas of what sacrifice means, or justice.”[5]
“It’s something she says. ‘Kneeling can be more intimate than sex,’” he tells Leonard.[6]
Etty’s words date from November 1941, only eight months after her diary’s opening entry, which includes this sentence: “I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside me something is still locked away.”[7] To Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Etty’s writings are “a Confessions of St Augustine for our own times.”[8]
Since the original publication, first in Dutch, then in English, in the early 1980s, of Etty’s diary and a few of her letters, her reputation has grown by leaps and bounds.[9] In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI pronounced her a woman “transfigured by faith” despite her earlier years as a “frail and dissatisfied young woman” who had led a “restless life.”[10]
In Bombay, at seventeen, Pico listened repeatedly to Leonard’s famous early songs “Suzanne” and “So long, Marianne.”[11] Desire, Pico writes, got Leonard into his “deepest trouble.”[12] Leonard’s songwriting, according to Pico, is a “Buddhist practice” that picks apart “every inconstancy” and reminds us to live calmly with all that we cannot control.[13]
A life-long Jew, Leonard explored other spiritual systems, particularly Buddhism. In the mid-1990s, he lived at the Mount Baldy Monastery and Zen Center, east of Los Angeles, where he was personal assistant to Buddhist monk and Roshi (venerable master) Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, who was then in his late eighties.[14] Pico, during a visit, described Leonard as “an anonymous grunt” who scrubbed floors, cooked for the abbot and drove him to the doctor. Speaking of this experience, Leonard tells Pico that he’s found freedom from answers and questions, “A landscape without doubt.”[15]
Pico was born in Feb. 1957, two generations after Etty in Jan. 1914 and one after Leonard in Sept. 1934. He relates the story of a “sixty-six-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk of my boyhood” who set himself on fire in Saigon. The monk was protesting a crackdown on religion, “but even more, perhaps,” Pico writes, providing a reminder “that death might not be the enemy of life.”[16]
Etty did not have to die at Auschwitz, but she was predisposed to engage and bear witness to what life served up. On July 15, 1942, she was given a job at the Amsterdam Jewish Council. It came with an exemption from deportation, which was meant to keep her safe. But two weeks later she volunteered to go to Westerbork, a concentration camp in Drenthe province and the last stop before the death camps in the east, to provide support for Jews in transit. Worried friends repeatedly offered to help her escape and go into hiding. She always refused.[17]
“Events have become too overwhelming and too demonic to be stemmed with personal resentment and bitterness,” she wrote on July 11, 1942. “People often get worked up when I say it doesn’t really matter whether I go or somebody else does, the main thing is that so many thousands have to go. It is not as if I want to fall into the arms of destruction…. I am only bowing to the inevitable, and even as I do so I am sustained by the certain knowledge that ultimately they cannot rob us of anything that matters. But I don’t think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer.”[18]
A week on, Etty observed, “there is only one way of preparing the new age, by living it even now in our hearts.”[19] Her diary’s last entry was composed three months later. Its last sentence is a quiet exhortation: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”[20] Writing in Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, Patrick Woodhouse says Etty became “a universal person, seeking to be in communion with all peoples across all boundaries.”[21]
This universal person designation could apply as well to Leonard and Pico for their approaches to bearing witness and giving expression to that witness. Leonard’s is a rapturous case. When his business manager stole most of his money, financial necessity forced his return to the stage, which proved to be a late-in-life renaissance and a transcendent experience for audiences around the world. From 2008 through the end of 2013, he and the musicians who accompanied him played 380 shows.[22]
The actor Gabriel Byrne, who played Leonard in the 2020 film “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” attended the last concert the poet-troubadour gave in Dublin. “I think everybody there felt that it was more of a religious experience than a concert,” Byrne said, adding: “You felt like he was channelling something deep through himself to the audience.”[23]
Leonard exuded humility and gratitude in front of those audiences, but he also acknowledged reactions like that of Byrne. “I start with artistic dedication,” he said in one of his last interviews. “I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on other human receptors…. If you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is in a particularly salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.”[24]
Leonard’s “gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,” Bob Dylan has said.[25]
Those concerts, which saw the transformation of solitary songwriting into virtuoso performance, were joyous celebrations of community and the human experience. They were a collective and deeply appreciative acknowledgement of devotion, discipline and experience distilled into poetry and song. Composing “Hallelujah” took five years, “Anthem” took ten[26] and “Treaty,” from “You Want It Darker,” took seven.[27]
Unlike Leonard and Pico, Etty did not have the opportunity of extended time to age into wisdom. Yet she maintained, “All of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go,”[28] a perspective Pico echoes when he writes about the longing that many people feel. It’s a longing, a monk friend tells him, that can also become “the ecstasy.”[29]
Pico, Etty, Leonard: Each of their lives is a mystical testament to Leonard’s lyric from “Anthem” that There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
On April 30, 1942, the day the Nazis decreed that Dutch Jews must wear the yellow star, Etty’s diary response was: “Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never, give up.”[30]
This need to bear, and to witness, the human condition with stark honesty is something Pico understands, and Leonard did too. According to Pico, Leonard’s songs illuminate “a struggle in which words like ‘happiness’ and ‘sadness’ are beside the point.” His music tells us, “the only thing you can believe in… is a reality you can’t comprehend.”[31]
Text copyright © 2025 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved. Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.
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