An online discussion with New Zealand writer, Alexander Bisley, December, 2012, Mr. Bisley later used some of this in articles he wrote for the Dominion Post and other New Zealand papers. His website is http://lumiere.net.nz

1) “What means the fact—which is so common, so universal—that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?” That’s The Man Within My Head’s engaging epigraph.  Is there a connection between Graham Greene, and Leonard Cohen, whom you’ve memorably written about in Sun After Dark and liner notes like Songs From the Deep?

I sometimes feel I’ve spent most of my recent life writing on Leonard Cohen—almost a book’s worth of essays and meditations now—and, indeed, the connections between him and Greene are so intense that I once had 20 pages in my book devoted to just that. (Later, they became among the 2,760 pages I wrote that I ultimately omitted).

Both men are clearly devoted for the duration to the spiritual life and to essential questions, but seem allergic to final answers, or settling to any fixity or category; both are clearly congregations of one, determined to take themselves away from the worlds they know (and could easily command), to places of challenge and even darkness. Both are known for their unease with commitments, for their mix of romanticism and realism, for their lifelong engagement with suffering, as it’s felt on the pulse.

And both are always rigorously honest about their failures in the realms of commitment and fidelity, yet deeply gracious to and supportive of others. Sometimes that combination of kindness towards the world and tough-mindedness towards the self might almost be my definition of the good life.

So indeed when you hear Cohen whispering his intimacies in the dark on stage, it’s not so far from Greene, in the confessional box of his novels, telling us about his guilts and insufficiencies. “My goal,” Cohen once said, “is to write with compassion about deceit in the human heart.” I can’t think of a better description of what Greene is doing. Both of them put honesty before comfort and questioning before belief.

2) When I interviewed you about Sun After Dark at Auckland 2007, and asked what you hoped the audience would take away, you replied: “Maybe to be surprised, taken aback, that’s the main thing I look for myself when I go somewhere, listen to somebody. I am happy to be moved and illuminated, but maybe the best thing is if something is set spinning inside me, that I got back to my room and I’m still thinking about it, maybe something I’ve never imagined. I try to bring back little timebombs from my travels so that people think differently, or at least are not so confident that they know everything.” (Also I note: “I think the main reason I travel, if I were to sum it up in one word, is for ambiguity. The reason I love travel is not just because it transports you in every sense, but because it confronts you with emotional and moral challenges that you would never have to confront at home. So I like going out in search of moral and emotional adventure, which throws me back upon myself and forces me to reconsider my assumptions and the things I took for granted. It sends me back a different person.”) How do you hope The Man Within My Head might surprise readers, set off little time-bombs, get them thinking differently?

My old sentences, now that I’m confronted with them, sound a bit high-faluting or pretentious, but it’s clearly true that I prefer questions to answers, ambiguity to Hollywood happy endings and challenge to complacency. So I did work really hard in this book to avoid any resolutions, to keep the narrative as unsettling as possible (as it jumps from place to place and past to present), even to write in very long sentences to startle the reader out of easy or instantaneous responses. Only because I feel all of us are getting conditioned to taking things in online nowadays, in snippets, a few simple fragments at a time; so if a book can do anything, it’s to shock us out of those enclosures and try to bring us back to the much more confounding and necessary flow of real life.

Thus I try hard, following Greene, not to show anyone as good or bad in my book—only a thousand shades of grey; not to try to take any fixed positions or ideological stances; and always to turn away from categories or clarities to a human reality that tends to be much more confounding and ever-shifting. I hope the reader may emerge from the book as she would after a trip in Haiti or Bolivia, not necessarily comforted, not always smiling, but knowing she’s been somewhere that forces her to rethink a thing or two.

3) You hope that certain younger people who don’t know about Greene will responds to the idea of someone who “occupies and haunts their imagination” like Jay-Z or Kanye West? Is there a rap song by either of these rappers that interests you?

I wish I knew more about their work (though I was just hearing about Jay-Z’s work with oldies, and listening to the wonderful Zadie Smith say that she loves gangsta rap and she loves old movie songs from the ‘40s, and she doesn’t see a contradiction between them; indeed, I would say part of the beauty of her work is that it represents an unprecedented meeting and mingling of the two).

In using that reference, I was just trying to suggest that the examples change—two generations ago it might have been Greene and Maugham who haunted readers, now it might be David Mitchell or Zadie Smith (both heroes of mine)—but the fact of being possessed by a writer, singer or artist you’ve never met endures. The power of writing is that it puts another writer inside you—puts you inside a stranger’s head—and you may soon lose track of where the other ends and you begin.

4) Like Greene, you’ve written about film. “Rambo had conquered Asia,” Video Night in Kathmandu begins.  You wrote 3000 words for Monsoon Wedding’s DVD. You’ve written memorably about The Quiet American and Kundun, and when we met in 2007 you said you’d like to write more about film, particularly Scorsese.  Is this still the case? I am still taken by your reading about a Scorsese set: “like a monastic environment. Every now and then he explodes.”

Thank you. It’s funny how, whenever one puts something out in public, an image very quickly settles around one and becomes a kind of corset, or even straight-jacket (exactly what both Leonard Cohen and Graham Greene constantly fought against in their very different, restless ways). So because my first book, as you say, was about pop culture and the dance of East and West in ten different countries in Asia, many people assume, 25 years on, my great interest is pop culture, travel and ten countries in Asia—when in fact, it’s probably not (if only because—I hope—I’ve moved on a bit).

So I often get asked to write about travel and Asia, and almost never about film. Which is wonderful, because film thus remains my secret passion, one I’m always holding forth about to myself, and to my friends, but rarely am asked to discuss in public.

Which is fine, because there are lots of brilliant writers on film around, and literature is more of an abandoned orphan these days, which perhaps is in greater need of champions and protectors to take care of it in its retirement home (or old age at least). Even such purely literary writers as Naipaul say that film replaced the novel, sometime in the middle of the last century, as the narrative form of choice, and the one that most people wanted to follow.

But I love directors such as Scorsese for their deeply questioning, alert, even literary ability to put the essential issues of any life onto the screen in such palpitating ways. It’s no surprise that Scorsese, former seminarian who once wanted to become a priest, and who famously said, “You don’t work your sins out in church. You do so on the streets,” once wanted to make a film of Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter. It wouldn’t be hard to see Scorsese as the direct heir to Greene, when it comes to Catholic self-questioning and unsparing moral realism—and when once I did an onstage conversation with Scorsese (one of the most humble and self-questioning and impressive people I’ve met), all we talked about was religion and the Greenian questions, much to his delight, I think.

I sometimes tell myself that all my writing is a feeble attempt to echo the vision of Terrence Malick, whose Days of Heaven, seen 33 years ago, remains the great, life-changing art-work of my time. Certainly I love the way that very accomplished professional philosopher and reader of everything from the Bible to Huck Finn was able to tell so straight a story, and to distill his many ideas into images that affect us in some post-verbal way, entirely sensually. As a writer I have to take the too many ideas swarming around my head and somehow distill them into character, story and music, so that the reader isn’t even consciously aware of their presence.

5)I was impressed to read: 8 years of work, 3000 pages, distilled to 250. How was the film connection you and Greene share cut down?

Greene visibly learned economy, structural subtlety and how to use dialogue as a form of action from his work in film (most notably in writing The Third Man, which he first wrote out as a novella, in order to distill it down into a screenplay). I was just reading his celebrated novel, The Heart of the Matter, from the late ‘40s. And if you compare it with The Quiet American, only a few years later, they might be written, stylistically, by different people (even though the themes and the signature touches are very much the same).

By the time of the later book, he was keeping scene-setting—even anguished reflection– to a minimum, learning the dramatic effectiveness of starting a story at the end and focusing in at certain critical moments just on two voices in the dark, the kind of cinematic close-up that showed his gift for intimacy and intensity to greatest advantage.

I haven’t worked enough in film, alas, to master all those skills, though I do think it’s a wonderful way to learn story-telling and dialogue (as Raymond Chandler also found). The attempt at compression you may see in this new book of mine really comes more from my 25 years of living in Japan, and my wish to temper my teeming Indian mind with a bit of Japanese austerity and quiet. In any Japanese room, as in a haiku or a brush-and-ink painting, the central space is as empty as possible, with perhaps just one object on display so as to train the visitor in attention and to move her to find everything she wants and needs in just a single object. One thing seen well can take one much deeper than a thousand things seen glancingly.

So in writing 3000 pages and distilling them down to 240, I was trying to honour some of the principles of my neighbors here in Japan. My instinct as a writer—a bad one—has always been to try to squeeze in as much as possible; I thought there might be a value in trying to leave things out.

6) One terrific passage from Chapter 7 of The Man Within My Head. “When I heard critics drone on about how Phuong in The Quiet American was “objectified,” or two- dimensional, the product of a man’s boyish fantasy, I wondered how they could speak so coldly about the mysteries of human kindness and affection. A companion is someone who refuses to take the things we fret about too seriously—starting with ourselves—even though she cares for us entirely. Phuong offers the unquiet Englishman exactly the sense of peace and acceptance he longs for—and cannot find—in church.” Could you expand on this?

I think—maybe Greene thought too—that many of us are far too ready to impose judgements, ideological filler and prejudices on everything we see, and so deny them their richness and ambiguity, while denying ourselves the chance to really engage with them. Whenever someone prattles on about how “sexist” or “racist” or “imperialist” or any “ist” Greene (or many another person from another age) is, I wonder if they’re just trying to avoid sincerely dealing with them, to put them into a box because a struggling, inconsistent, squawling realty is so much harder to contain and to describe. Greene, after all, works constantly to try to see his characters in terms much larger and more mysterious than their race, their colour or their gender. All his beings, Phuong not least, are souls at sea amidst the complexities of life, wavering (as we all do at times) between realism and romance.

I also felt that it would be easy, if you’ve never been to Asia, to assume that Phuong was a stereotype or a two-dimensional portrait of a certain kind of Asian woman, submissive, adaptable and sweet; having been with my Japanese wife for 25 years now, living in Japan, I can see that the way surface plays off depth, the importance of a role (which may have nothing to do with who you are), the relation of compliance to conquest are all much different from the way they are in the West, or, indeed, from the way I might have assumed when first I arrived on this side of the world. I feel, here in Japan—or in Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines—as if I’m moving through a world of Phuongs, and the fact that I can’t begin to understand them, and to see where the lines of innocence and calculation run in them, is a large part of a fascination of the place.

So I suppose I admire agnosticism and open-endedness in anything, and I hope to have learned a little about them from Greene. That’s wht I love Zadie Smith, of course: her Shakespearean gift for seeing every situation through the eyes of all the people in it.

7) Derek Walcott, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salmon Rushdie, Pankaj Mishra, yourself, there’s an extraordinary wave of postcolonial writers who have energised literature? The Empire Strikes Back with the Booker Prize going to colonials. I don’t want to excuse colonial sins, and I have significant respect and admiration for the alternative perspective and fierce intellect of sharper postcolonial theorists like Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. However, I think among a certain zeal of postcolonial academics there’s a relentless, reductive focus on ferreting out the bigotry of the past that lacks the same empathy it is so righteous about (even JM Coetzee has been raked over the coals on some university campuses!). Thoughts?

I think I probably just began to answer this, albeit inadvertently! I am a great admirer—and to some extent beneficiary—of post-colonial literature. As the only dark-skinned boy in all my classes in England, growing up, I was thrilled to be steeped in Beowulf and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Hardy; but when I came out into the world, in the early ‘80s, I was no less thrilled that its new realities were being given such invigorating voice by Rushdie, Ondaatje, Ishiguro, Tan and so many others. It was as if the stuffy old house of English letters—and the guest-house of the English Language—were suddenly having its doors and windows thrown open, to admit fresh smells, new spices, intriguing sounds, new histories and new ways of telling history.

And, of course, when I began writing about the world, I was writing in the hope (which is surely Naipaul’s hope and Rushdie’s hope) that when I wrote about India or England or Japan, I was writing not just as a typical Indian might, or as a typical person born and raised in England might, but as an ever-shifting mix of the two who didn’t fit into any of the traditional categories. Later, I wrote a lot, as you know, about post-colonialism as one deeply grateful for all the fresh air and new stories and combinations it continues to bring into our midst.

But I wouldn’t want to read Rushdie and neglect Greene or Hardy entirely, and I wouldn’t want to say or think that my kind of travel-writing was better than that of the imperialists of old; it’s great that we now have both and can set the two against each other and come up with new fusions (as Ondaatje does so majestically in works like The English Patient, which honour both the forms of Graham Greene and the new realities of Sikhs called Kip being the ones who fight for the British army and sometimes seem more English than their English masters do).

So I wouldn’t want post-colonialism itself to become its own dogma or imperialism, its own way of shutting the door on great writers of the past.

8 ) The Lady and the Monk and The Man Within My Head seem especially personall?

I think they only seem that way; I warned a lot of my friends that The Man Within My Head deliberately lacks a subtitle as a way of showing readers that it’s a hybrid, something that is designed to float somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. I’ve never liked the memoir form because I think we’re least reliable, least to be trusted, when we’re talking or writing about ourselves; it’s the subject on which we’re most inclined to be covert or deceiving or fictional. That’s why the great memoirs, for me—the ones that remake the form—are all presented to us as fiction (by Roth in The Facts, by Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival, by Coetzee in a whole series of books, by le Carre in The Perfect Spy, by Paul Theroux in My Other Life and The Secret History).

For a certain kind of person, especially one raised in traditional England, it’s easiest to be personal when writing about something else. My writing tends to be most personal, I’d say, when I’m writing on Cohen or Greene or the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, or Japan, or anything I passionately care about, not least my longtime sweetheart. But ask me to write about myself and I’ll be evasive and coy and probably find it hard to say anything interesting or true.

That’s part of the syndrome I’m interested in and try to explore in The Man Within My Head. Graham Greene wrote two memoirs and they are full of charming stories and colourful characters and childhood memories. But you put them down knowing less about him than when you began. Essentially, both are brilliant exercises in camoflage and subterfuge.

Yet give him a cover, by calling a work fiction, and he presents himself with a harrowing nakedness and vulnerability on the page, the very nakedness that moves readers like myself to feel we’re very close to him.

9) Appropriately, your next book is a 25-year follow up to The Lady and the Monk (what changes, and what never changes in the greater Kyoto region)?

Perhaps. But I may end up never writing it. I have more than 1,000 pages of notes accumulated over my many years of living in Japan, but sometimes, the more you know of a place or person, the less you’re interested in saying anything about it. The deepest relationships mock words, I sometimes feel, and underline their redundance.

So it was much easier to write about my Japanese sweetheart and the country that I love after one year of their acquaintance than after a quarter of a century. I’ll only persevere with that book if I can make its theme fresh and new to me, come up with a sense of discovery.

10) From The Man Within My Head? At 33. “By the time the Californian wildfire had reduced our house and everything in it to rubble, I had decided to make my sense of belonging truly internal and go to the most clarifying society I knew, Japan.” Still?

Still, and always. Interestingly, perhaps, I spent two or three years working on that single word “clarifying.” There are so many other words I could have used, and did use in the eight years I was working on my recent book. But finally, maybe last year, I decided on “clarifying,” so it’s my most up-to-date assessment of Japan and its place in my life.

Maybe a few years from now I’ll come up with something deeper.

11) How far is where you live in rural Nara from central Kyoto?

It’s ninety minutes away—by bus and then train and then second train and then third train: in other words, a safe distance for keeping the sense of wonder and excitement alive. A part of me is glad not to live in the city that moves me most, and not to burden and complicate it (and myself) with bills and laundromats and the small print of the daily. It’s still an event for me to go to Kyoto—as I do maybe every two or three weeks (and therefore pehaps ten times in a year). I still bring real excitement to the place and can’t take it for granted. And I bring curious eyes to it and a sense of occasion and register its changes a little, as perhaps I couldn’t do if I lived surrounded by it.

Perhaps it’s a little like the process whereby I never really wanted to meet Graham Greene. If I had met him, I’d have come away with a few sensory impressions, an anecdote or two, a tiny sense of fulfillment. But I’d probably have lost much more, by encountering only the urbane public man who was very skilled at keeping admirers at a distance. On the page, I feel, I’m getting his soul, or bits of it, not just his social persona. His suboconscious, what makes him special, and not the surface and persona that belong very much to a certain class and a certain age.

12) I love your illumination of Emerson’s Universal Soul in The Global Soul, and discourse on relentless global flux. “The temptation in the face of all this can be (as the great analyst of the modern condition, Graham Greene, saw) to try and lay anchor anywhere, even in a faith one doesn’t entirely believe, just so one will have a home and solid ground under one’s feet. To lack a centre, after all, may be to lack something essential to the state of being human; “to be rooted,” as Greene’s fellow admirer of Catholicism, Simone Weil, said, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Pico Iyer is rooted in a strong internal life

You put it perfectly here. The more movement we have in our lives, the more we need stillness, to put the movement in perspective, to make sense of all we’re going through. And the current age of distraction and fragmentation places a particular emphasis on clarity,  concentration and spaciousness I feel.

Those of us who are lucky enough to have access to many cultures have to work long and hard to make sure we know where we belong, internally, what guides and sustains us, who we are. Home, after all, is not the place where you sleep; it’s the place where you stand.

And clearly someone like myself, who has had a lot of movement in his life, comes to a place like Japan to learn rootedness, continuity and, as you perfectly say, the wisdom of the seasons, which are essentially a lesson on changelessness and change.

13) I am fond of the idea of “a counterbiography. It hovers in some dream space, the way Graham Greene does in my head.”

You note that Greene’s “unfortunate biographer” Norman Sherry was so possessed by his subject that he ended up as Greene “the figure of tormented self-doubt”.  How did you deal with self-doubt on this long project?

I embraced it. I thought self-doubt—a remorseless self-questioning and attempt at candor and refusal to settle for evasions—was one of the things I could most usefully try to learn from Greene. Not that I succeeded; but this is the challenge he throws at the reader—to look at himself as unsparingly as Greene looks at himself, and to put his conscience to the test, whether he’s committed to a belief or not.

My first book has a lot of confidence in it, and something of the brashness and the too easy assurance of a kid in his twenties taking on the world for the first time and passing judgments on it after a few minutes’ acquaintance. There’s a place for that, and for someone writing a long book in three months, in his twenties, on a leave from Time magazine, it was probably the best I could do. But I think there’s a benefit in another kind of writing as well, in which one takes oneself to task, doesn’t give oneself the benefit of the doubt and assumes one’s in a near-perfect state of ignorance. That’s what both Leonard Cohen and Graham Greene do, and maybe that’s a little of what I was aspiring towards in The Man Within My Head.

15) Phillip Roth is another favourite writer of yours. I see a possible Greenian apostle; for example, both write honestly and eloquently about succumbing to temptation?   Both thoughtfully mock conventional, simple morality.

Wonderfully said. Certainly Roth, especially in his troubled relations with women, resembles Greene’s literary godfather, Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage reads to me very much like early Roth, albeit translated to a much more uncensored, furious, ravening, post-war American voice.

And you’re absolutely right that both seem to hold, with glee and mischief and fury, that a too-simple morality can be as dangerous as amorality or even immorality. They realize that our deepest moral dilemmas can’t be solved on the page or in the head, and will only be resolved after we’ve probably gone a long way in the wrong direction.

And certainly there is no shortage of Greenian apostles: while writing my book, I came across at least seven other writers who had more or less abandoned their own lives in order to lead, or recreate, Greene’s, and they were male and female, British and American (Gloria Emerson, the fearless American war correspondent, wrote only one novel, and it’s called Loving Graham Greene; David Lodge dedicates an early novel to Greene, yet includes a parody of Greene in the same book; Paul Theroux saw Greene as a kind of father, and featured him in a novel; John Banville portrays Greene as a kind of demon, a treacherous liar, in his novel on the English spies of the 20^th century, and Alan Judd depicts Greene as literally a devil, a devouring dark spirit who possesses a young English literary man in The Devil’s Own).

William Cash set aside his life to pursue Greene’s love life in The Third Woman, and Norman Sherry, Greene’s official biographer, seems more or less to fall in love with Greene’s American mistress, while also taking on Graham C. Greene, the writer’s nephew, as his literary agent for the project and managing to contract dysentery in the same tiny Mexican mountain village where Greene had contracred it thirty years before.

One of the questions animating my book was why and how Greene has this gift for possessing people, for getting under the skin and into their souls, in a way that perhaps more highly regarded contemporaries of his—George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh—do not. It’s an interesting fact that the most influential writers, in this way, are not always the greatest writers.

16) Some of my favourite lines from Video Night in Kathmandu follow. These views still hold? “That the country of my dreams is still Japan,”/Returned to Californa: “Homesick—not just for the gentleness and grace that I had found in many parts of Asia, but also, and more deeply, for the gentler self it had found in me.”/Purity “Lanterned nights in Kyoto so lovely that I almost held my breath for fear I might shatter the spell.”

Thank you. I took a lot of trouble over those lines because, unlike much in that speedy book, they really came from the depths of me. So they are the rare lines that I could happily live with 28 years later, now. They are just how I still feel—though by now I perhaps feel them so deeply that it might be hard for me to put words to them.

(An introduction to the 17-set complete collection of Leonard Cohen albums released by Sony Records for online sales, 2011)

Some artists come from the Mississippi Delta, some from the South Side of Chicago. But a few, a very few, come from nowhere you can name and you’ll never get to the bottom of them. People will tell you that Leonard Cohen was a 33 year-old novelist out of Montreal and one of Canada’s leading poets when he brought out his first record,  “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” in 1968. But how does the romantic young seeker of those early gypsy ballads go with the ordained Zen monk of the early 21^st century, and how does that wise elder writing about death and loss begin to fit with the smooth, Armani-clad field commander, declaring “I’m Your Man”? How does either jibe with the singer whose dark laments were buried under Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, or the ancient psalmist whose work has been covered by Bon Jovi and Willie Nelson? Who could have guessed that a 74 year-old grandfather, in the middle of a two-and-a-half year world tour, would see his 23 year-old song, “Hallelujah,” at number 1, number 2 and number 34 in the British Top 40 simultaneously?

Cohen sits outside every category, and throws together high culture and street slang, Buddha and the blues, so you never know what’s coming next.  He’s less one man than an anthology of selves, waltzer and country singer and techno-maestro all knitted at the core in some mysterious recess. He’s lived in Nashville, in L.A. (and in the high dark mountains behind L.A. at the Mount Baldy Zen Center) as well as on the carless Greek island of Hydra, known for its donkeys and faraway monasteries. He’s inspired film-makers from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Oliver Stone and acted as the head of Interpol on Miami Vice. He’s written a classic Old Testament book of psalms and sung on “Duets” with Elton John. Everything you know of him is wrong.

The sixteen albums collected in this set, though, give you a compendious, almost a comprehensive introduction to many, many of the dapper, searching, droll and ceremonial men called Leonard Cohen. You’ll meet the earnest troubadour with “one hand on a hexagram and one hand on a girl” and you’ll see the grave old philosopher who could be met on the backstreets of Jerusalem. You’ll hear the sound of a soul, alone, raising a cry to the heavens, and that of the silky man of the world accompanied by a chorus of female voices. You’ll think you’re listening to one of the great ironists of rock ‘n’ roll—“We met when we were almost young”—and then you’ll hear him calling out for surrender. Passing, as his fellow poet Thom Gunn once said of his own work, “the romantic impulse through a classical scrutiny,” he’ll give you what a fellow monk, Thomas Merton, liked to call the “smoke self.”

You’ll learn, of course, about sin and punishment and pride, and then you’ll lose yourself amidst the raucous, overturning chorus of “Closing Time.” You’ll recall, perhaps, that many of the more than 20 million records he has sold have been in Norway and Malaysia, and you’ll remember that one of his deepest albums, “Various Positions,” barely came out in the U.S. You’ll hear him deliver words like “naked” and “thighs” and “ache” as if he’s burning; but then he’s giving up everything in “If It Be Your Will” or singing of “Stalin and St. Paul.” These are songs from the deep, but it’s not always easy to see if he’s going deep into a woman, or into his own pain and unworthiness, or into the moment when “I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too.”  As John Donne wrote, four centuries ago, “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow/But yet his body is his book.”

Leonard Cohen is probably the most literary spirit ever to look in on the pop charts, the one formal poet who will craft meticulous, clenched quatrains and a language of “thee”s and references to Cavafy and put them to melodies you might have heard in Krakow three hundred years ago. Many of his friends and contemporaries—Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, say—are clearly poets, yet both are first and foremost songwriters and singers who happen to have a wild way with words; Cohen is a man of words—“holy” and “lonely” and “broken”—fashioning verses as bottomless and riddled as those of Emily Dickinson (but set to bandurria and laud accompaniment that can hold 90,000 rapt at Glastonbury}.

Take away the music, though, and you feel bereft; these are songs, not poems. “Everyone says I know only three chords,” the singer said to me when I visited him once at his monastery. “I actually know five.” See the words on the page without the gravelly grumble, the arrangements that suggest a dark empty room in the dead of night, the raggedly simple tunes, and you’re missing half the point. The very imperfectness of the delivery is part of what gives the songs gravitas and humanness and history; it lets the light get in. Cohen’s melodies are so tuneful that some of his songs have received 200 or more cover versions; yet no one else singing “Suzanne” or “Bird on a Wire” or “Hallelujah” can give us the battered depth and weathered soulfulness that he does, and mix a song about King David and Bathsheba with invocations to a Zen master and a way of rhyming “do you” with “Hallelujah.”

Ever since the beginning, Cohen has been telling us not to believe in a fixed self and not to fall prey to expectation, especially of short cuts or easy answers. Even when young, he was giving us the growl of winter around the edge of longing, the crooked grin that rose above the pure-hearted hymn. Always he has taken us into the essential questions of life—death, sex, war, betrayal—without ever taking himself too seriously. So it’s a treat, in hearing his whole career tumble out on this set, to recall that he was writing, in his first novel, in 1963, “We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently” forty years before he seemed to be living that part. In 2006 he gave Anjani Thomas a poem to sing that he’d published in 1961.

Listen to any or all of these sixteen albums, more than sixteen hundred times, and you’ll see that you’re constantly getting new things from them. The songs are built to last, even if they talk about impermanence. The verses are sturdy, impeccably crafted—Cohen spent a decade getting the stillness of a song like “Anthem” just right—and you’ll never find anything shoddy or casual. They’re aged, you could say, and given weight and power by the sound of the years in them, the ageless Biblical words, the perspective that will bring “the bloody cross on top of Calvary” and the “beach at Malibu” into the same frame.

The island of Hydra, another North American wanderer in Europe, Henry Miller, wrote in a notebook, is “the birthplace of the immaculate conception. An island built by a race of artists. Everything miraculously produced out of nothingness. Each house related to the other, as though by an unseen architect. Everything white as snow yet colorful. The whole town is like a dream creation: a dream built out of rock.” Hydra, Miller wrote, produces nothing but “heroes and emancipators.” Is it any wonder that, inheriting some money from his grandmother, the young Cohen paid $1500 for a house on the Greek island, and it was from there that his early songs from a room began to emerge?

A dream creation; and a dream built out of rock.

The Leonard Cohen Complete Collection can be bought only directly from the Popmarket store–http://www.popmarket.com/leonard-cohen-the-complete-columbia-albums-collection/details/25975999

The XIVth Dalai Lama went out into a grayish morning in Sendai, his seventh full day in Japan this year, and drove for an hour or so the 30 miles that lead to Ishinomaki, the area most devastated by the tsunami of March 11. As his car approached the area, the scene took on an air of unutterable sadness: houses sat like empty sockets, their first floors shattered and ravaged by the storm (while their second floors sat untouched); telephone poles stood at 45-degree angles, and cars could be seen still floating on the water. His Holiness’s car passed crumpled gas stations, houses that were just gaping holes, huge boats keeled over in the sea. What was once clearly a busy neighborhood was now a ghost town, rows upon rows of houses buckled over and crumbling, cars piled up in mountains of scrap meal.

Roughly 12,000 people died on a single day here, and only 4000 of their bodies have been found.

In the middle of the desolation–there was rubble everywhere, graves were crushed with their headstones falling over, pieces of washing still hung out in front of skeleton houses, and a chair sat in a hollowed-out living-room–the Dalai Lama got out of his car and walked right over to the people who had gathered in the street to see him.

“What do you feel?” he asked them, extending a strong hand and arm. “Are you still sad?” Women broke down weeping in front of him, some sobbing, “Thank you, thank you.” In this scene of high emotion, His Holiness said, “Some sorrow befell you here. That’s all finished now. You can’t change what’s happened. Please change your hearts, be brave. Please help everyone else, and help others become more okay.”

The people in the crowd fell quiet and nodded as he spoke. “Too many people died,” he said. “If you worry, it can’t help them. Please work hard; that is the best offering you can make to the dead. I’m so happy I could come and see you.”

As he turned around, His Holiness took off his glasses and wiped away some tears himself.

Then, in a long procession of black-robed monks, to the sound of solemn chanting, the Tibetan leader walked in from the road and slowly up the path towards the local temple, Saikoji, past wreckage on every side, more gravestones crushed or tilted over, greeting a group of kindergarten children, all in blue uniforms, who had been at school the day of the calamity and so survived. Around him trees were torn into stumps and a line of small stone Jizos (the Japanese god of children) sat with red bibs around their necks, protecting the living and the dead.

Walking between the long lines of people seated on chairs outside the front entrance, His Holiness entered the temple, prostrating three times before its central Buddha. Then a packed audience within recited the Heart Sutra in Japanese, and His Holiness led some Tibetan monks in chanting the sutra in Tibetan.

His Holiness began by speaking about how he had come to share the pain of the people here, “particularly those who lost one of their dear friends or relatives,” and reminded them how, as the tragedy unfolded, “many people in all parts of the world, as soon as they heard of the situation, thought, `You are not alone.’

“As soon as I heard of this tragedy, on the BBC news, I instantly felt, `How much pain!’ And remembered my many trips to Japan since 1967.” Beside him, next to the altar, were fifty or more colored packages neatly lined up, with the bones of the dead inside them, and in front of them framed portraits of the deceased, both young and old, with bottles of tea or keepsakes to remember them. “On the way here,” His Holiness went on, “I asked the driver if the tsunami had come here. Then I noticed, suddenly, everything was completely different. I was very much moved. When I shook the hands of the people here, tears came to my eyes.

“But, it already happened. And as humans, we have intelligence. When such a thing happens, we must think! With our intelligence, combined with self-confidence, we can overcome all these problems. So tragedy certainly, naturally, brings sadness and demoralizes us; but now you must transform it into enthusiasm and self-confidence and work hard to rebuild your lives, your country. Particularly with these young children here: provide them with education and let them lead another happy new generation.”

As he went on, in front of hundreds in the temple, and many hundreds more seated outside, and standing at the back, following his every movement on large screens, His Holiness recalled how, in his own life, leaving Lhasa in 1959, he had left behind many friends “and one small dog” and then heard, two days later, that many of them were dead. “Of course I felt a lot of sadness. But, as I mentioned earlier, I had my intelligence, and also my belief in truth. So the tragedy could be transformed into a source of inner strength. Now, 52 years have passed, and I always keep determination, enthusiasm.”

He remembered, too, how Japan, through hard work, had rebuilt a new country from the ashes of war, particularly through “your very good sense of co-operation.”

Then, walking to the front of the temple, he addressed directly those sitting outside. “Whether we are believers or not, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “We must be realistic. So one Buddhist teacher, in the 8th century, explained: `If a tragedy happens, look at that tragedy holistically. Then you can overcome it. So don’t worry. Work hard. Try to work things out. If there’s no way to work it out, there’s no need to worry.’ ”

For those in theistic traditions, he said, “all these mysterious events are actually God’s creation. So there must be some meaning. So look at it that way. And in non-theistic traditions, such as Buddhism, everything is due to its own causes. Karma may come from this lifetime, but it may even come from previous lifetimes. From the Buddhist point of view, we must make forceful positive karma, which can be stronger than the previous negative karma. This can reduce or even eliminate the previous negative karma.

“So look forward. Lead some kind of new life, full of determination. Lead your life in an honest way, a truthful way. By truthful acts, by compassionate acts, increase positive karma.

“This is not the time for worry, for sadness. But with determination, and a Japanese sense of co-operation, you must rebuild this town; this is a good chance to show the world Japanese efficiency, Japanese ability. And, after rebuilding a new happy town, please send an invitation to me, and I will come and we will have a big festival.”

Everyone in the large audience was clearly moved, and after five children presented His Holiness with flowers, one after another, he asked them to pose for a picture with him, saying, “Smile, smile” to one shy little boy, and tickling him on the cheek. By the time he emerged from the temple, it was possible to see the scenes of destruction in a different light, as the Dalai Lama walked slowly back, holding older people who reached out for him, for a long, long time, comforting women carrying framed pictures of their lost ones.

*****

In the afternoon, in an atmosphere of sonorous bells and dark lanterns, His Holiness spoke inside Koushoji temple, at the center of the city of Sendai, and delivered a Buddhist address about overcoming suffering to a large audience, many in monastic robes and suits. “If some tragedy comes,” he explained, “you must look at it carefully. And you must try to transform it, even though you can’t change the event itself. I met many victims today: at first their pain was perhaps on the outside, but now it’s inside, invisible. For external pain, you can take medicine, see a doctor. But for inner pain, you must practice and make it better yourself.

“If you only think about your loss, for example, it increases the pain. But if, when your house is gone, you think about making a new, beautiful home, you can transform it into a positive. If you think, `Why is this suffering coming to me?’ that, too, increases the pain. That kind of thought is a delusion. See things in a wider perspective, and you can make your pain smaller.”

In the morning, before sobbing crowds, he had spoken from the heart and reached the hearts of many; in the afternoon, he gave the complementary, and more analytical Buddhist teaching, of how we must look at suffering realistically and transform it into possibility. He might have been a doctor, first offering sympathy and then, a diagnosis. In the diagnosis lay the cure, and the sense that in each of us is the capacity to begin to heal ourselves–in part by tending to others.

Q: This is an eccentric book, and I’m not sure what readers will make of it.

A: That’s not so terrible; one of the things I tried very hard to do here was create a weird, hybrid form of sorts, in which you never know what’s going to happen next—or who exactly is going to be the subject. A very full biography of Graham Greene, 2200 pages long, has already been written; novel after memoir after romance has been published by those who knew him and those who didn’t, yet feel haunted by him. The world has no need of another straight book on “Following Graham Greene” or evoking his personality.

But I hoped there might be room for a book that hovers unexpectedly somewhere between autobiography and biography, and tries to see how much what I say about Greene may really be about me, or vice versa; and a book that cuts back and forth between fairly quiet and private introspection and scenes of tumult in the world (which is just the back-and-forth I see and love in Greene). A year before I’d finished this book, I had a full subtitle to explain what it was about; six months later, my subtitle said only “An Enquiry”; now, the book has no subtitle at all. That’s meant to be a way of suggesting the mysterious, neither-here-nor-there quality of the book and of its subject. Is the “man within my head” Greene—or my father, or me? I don’t want to settle those questions.

The fact I was trying to make up my own genre didn’t make the book easy to write, of course; I had to devise my own structure, and follow a kind of emotional, improvised logic more than that of chronology or A-B-C.  And I wanted to expand the form to accommodate many different angles, which meant that I wrote maybe twenty times more than I ultimately had room for. But writing has to do something startling to justify its existence, especially as rivals to books multiply these days. After seven books of non-fiction and thousands, literally, of articles, I longed to do something new, to keep myself engaged; I’m a traveler at heart.

It wouldn’t be hard, I think, to write an interesting and fun book on Graham Greene, and many have done so splendidly. But I thought it would be more interesting to try something trickier, true to his shifting sense of identity—and maybe even to dramatize that sensation that every writer knows whereby you start writing a work on something that possesses you, and, as you proceed, you realize that it’s really about something very different, and a presence within you that you never even thought to explore is taking over.

Q:But doesn’t Greene these days feel like a figure out of the distant past? I don’t know how many young people read him now.

A: Nor do I. But the book, as I see it, is about soul possession of a kind, imaginary friends, those people who haunt us and take residence in our heads even if, especially if, they seem very remote to us. And that is timeless, perhaps even more common now than it was twenty years ago, thanks to our virtual, bodiless lives. It could be Steve Jobs among certain kids today, or Jay-Z—or Jane Austen; but I’m interested in what places them there–why Jay-Z and not Kanye West?–and what purpose they serve. What do they say about the people who ought to be prominent in our heads, often our parents, and what does it say about the nature of affinity? Why, for example, do I dream so often of Paris even though I’ve spent so little time there? Why do I never dream of the places where I’ve lived all my life?

Apart from all that, I think rumors of Greene’s literary death or irrelevance may be premature. He belongs very firmly to an age that seems vanished—the 1950s, you could say—and yet for me his real themes are the ageless ones, of fear and faith and betrayal. His books are almost allegories about a man on his knees by his bed in the dark, as mortarfire explodes outside, and his seeming enemy extends a hand. Friends of mine who teach tell me that some of their students find Greene an imperialist, or retrograde in his attitude to women, an emblem of the faded British Empire; yet those same teachers tell me that their students can’t stop talking about him!

It’s no coincidence, I think, that, together with Somerset Maugham, Greene keeps inspiring new movie versions of his books, every other year. He has often been a target of sniggers in the academy, for being so readable and traditional in his techniques and popular; but for most of us, those are precisely the reasons why he endures. The most recent film of The Quiet American had to be held back after it was screened for its producers on September 10, 2001—not because it was so irrelevant, but the opposite: because, 24 hours after the screening, it seemed much too close—again!—to the world we live in.

Q: There’s a lot about your father in this book. Is he its real subject?

A: No, though fatherhood might be, in part, and the nature of influence, and why, as I write in it, blood relations are not the only important ones.

To be honest, I never saw much of my father while I was growing up, because I was mostly at boarding-school, 6000 miles from home; like Greene in a way, I was a product of an ancient, cloistered system, in which one is taught to live alone, very far from family, and to take one’s family from among one’s friends, and not always one’s relatives. And my father, though a strong and very vivid figure, was gracious enough to let me gain my education far away from him.

But, like most of us, I found—and find, as the years go on—that there’s far more of my father in me than I would ever have imagined. The same person I grew away from is in my face and in my voice daily. And in that regard, too, the great project of self-invention—so many of us are proud of seeming to have made ourselves up, as it were, from scratch–has failed, or is a myth.

My father was a wonderfully colorful soul, who came out of nowhere to win India’s only Rhodes Scholarship in 1950 and seemed likely to become a leading figure in India until he went to California in the ‘60s; but possibly for that very reason, I never felt I knew exactly who he was beneath the surface. That becomes even more interesting when I see how much of him is in me, and how little I know of myself, perhaps, underneath my gestures and reflexes.

I invoke Greene here because to me he is the great model of unflinching self-questioning, of honesty and of intimacy on the page, if not in life; you can say that he was slippery, treacherous, self-enclosed and a model of non-commitment, but then you’d have to add that he said all of that about himself, and much better, in his books.

Plus, the more I reread his work, the more I found that fathers, actual and imagined, were one of his great themes, which haunt every book from the first published novel, in 1926, to the last, in 1989. I don’t know nearly enough about my father to write a memoir, and not all the things I do know would fit into a book such as this; but it’s the larger dynamic that intrigues me, of how you can best see yourself when reflected back to you in another person. Unriddling an unmet writer may be a wonderful way of unriddling yourself. “Most people,” as Oscar Wilde said, “are other people”; that’s arguably the launching-pad of much fiction and drama.

Q: You’re mostly known as a writer of travel books. Isn’t this a departure?
A: Not to me. Who traveled more than Greene, especially in some inward sense? That’s part of what I love about him: the mobility, the ability to see things from many different angles, the refusal to remain fixed within dogma or seeming certainty. Even faith was something he traveled around, constantly, rather than something he settled into.

As Thoreau often said, it takes much more courage to venture into the icy depths and dark caverns within oneself than just to go to Haiti or Saigon—especially these days, when the latter merely involves jumping on a plane.

This book moves, of course, with deliberate abruptness, from Bolivia to Mexico to Vietnam to Ethiopia to Cuba to Colombia to Sri Lanka to Bhutan and back to Bolivia; its central poles are California and England. But its real theme, as I say somewhere, is how travel can affect one’s approach to the world, make one a relativist, or help one see the point of almost every position and sympathize, sometimes fatally, with both sides in an argument. And how travel, more than anything, dramatizes the moral and emotional struggles that often we look past or shy away from when we’re at home.

In some ways—though people may be shocked to hear this—I see this book as being very much a sequel to my last book, on the Dalai Lama. Friends of mine have asked, “How can you possibly liken a famous man of spiritual clarity and goodness to one of literature’s most celebrated sinners and doubters?” But Greene, for me—or the Greene I choose to imagine—was always preoccupied with the Dalai Lama’s questions: how to act with conscience and kindness in the world, and how to be a realist and yet have faith? One wise friend of mine in New York said to me, a few years ago, “Every time you come to the city, it’s either to talk about Raymond Chandler or the Dalai Lama.” Now I’ve brought the two together a bit.

Like most writers, I suppose, I see all my books as being of a piece. My first two were explicitly about the exchange of dreams (or sometimes illusions) between cultures on far sides of the world. One of the central themes in this book is my commute between my parents’ home in the California of the ‘60s and the 15^th century boarding-school in which I grew up in England. Between faith and skepticism, you could say; between the very fluid and the very settled. In each of them, it seemed to me, people were dreaming of what the other had, and in some ways Greene’s own commute, between his father, headmaster of such a school, and his rebellions against him, his shadow-fathers—like the Jungian dream analyst he stayed with as a teenager–reflected my situation exactly, in reverse. His great novel, for me, The Quiet American, is about nothing other than the haunted fascination and closeness between an aging Englishman and a young idealistic American.

I think most readers have some equivalent in their lives, and one of the stories of the age is how we move between centuries and completely disparate lives at greater speed and with greater ease than ever before. One thing that has always moved me about Greene is that he writes in such a personal way, about the most private and often agonizing issues, yet somehow he reaches and speaks to millions of the rest of us.

Q: Did you enjoy writing this book?

A: I really did. In part because it was such a challenge, so different in terms of structure from anything I’d written before, so unexpected even to me. It may not look like it, because I worked very hard to give it a haunted and even troubled feel, to be loyal to what I see and admire in Greene, and because I see Greene as an incitement to look at precisely the shadows and uncertainties I’d rather look away from. And I deliberately took myself to places that are edgy and murky, that ask difficult questions. But that’s the fun of writing for me, and that’s what makes it such an adventure. I’ve written quite a bit about the externals of the world, books of observation; so it’s intriguing for me to try something more inward and to make myself a subject of investigation.

I’ve never worked so hard on any book before; I spent more than eight years producing what is only a slim work, and I sent my first finished draft to my editor six and a half years ago. Indeed, I wrote the whole book as fiction—a series of imaginative approaches to Greene—and then decided that that would serve just as “back story,” a way of getting deeper into him, as I took him on in non-fictional form. I would say that I wrote 3000 highly polished, finished, fact-checked pages to generate the 250 I finally sent in. And even read the entire manuscript aloud to make sure the commas and cadences fell in the right places.

But that’s all part of the joy of the process! My first books I wrote very quickly—I was a full-time journalist then—and I feel they read amusingly and speedily and are full of facts and brisk sentences; but they may evaporate equally fast. My more recent books are much harder to read and enjoy; but my hope is that, for a handful at least, they may linger in the mind or prompt occasional rereadings. Of course, I’m writing against the curve, producing ever slower, more inward and more recessive books as the culture as a whole moves towards speed, immediacy, pell-mell stimulation. But that’s deliberate. And if readers want very quick diversion, they can find it much more excitingly in many other places.

For me the value of reading, more than ever, is to take us to those places that the rest of life ignores. Writing can’t begin to compete against all the multi-media, split-screen, visual and auditory excitements of the time for pace or urgency; but it can offer us a few deeply inward pleasures—even silences—that none of those new technologies can match. I wanted this book to stake out that space, that sense of mystery and nuance, which almost nothing but writing can bring us towards. If the reader takes away questions, tremors, uncertainties—and not the facts or sensations that our onscreen lives so constantly bombard us with—I’ll be delighted!