Book of Mercy

Found a CBC radio broadcast with my man, Leonard Cohen, about The Book of Mercy. When the interviewer comments that the book resulting from an 'experience' is “not necessarily the work of a believer, this is not a demonstration of faith or conviction, is it?”, Leonard replies:

“Those kinds of questions - I believe or I don’t believe - those belong to the mind, and, appropriately to the mind but…when you find yourself in that landscape where the only thing you can do is prayer, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not, because you’re not using that faculty that evaluates the
reality of faith or the reality of God or not - it’s a completely different landscape; it is a cry, and there is an object of the
cry, and it’s a certainty in that place.”
“One is not interested in proving or not proving the existence of the object; if you address yourself to the source of mercy, you might have the good luck to discover that there is a
source of mercy… There is a source of mercy as I experienced it, and these poems are the document of that address and that kind of deliverance.”

find the whole interview here