We left the pizza parlor, turned the corner, and who should be sitting at a table outside a burger restaurant but Jikan Leonard Cohen himself. He had an office nearby, and we spent the afternoon brainstorming about how to revitalize the monastery now that our teacher was dead.

“What if you put in a rifle range and get a bunch of young guys up there?” Jikan said. “Man, if I were 15 minutes younger, I’d join you.”

Yes, rifles. For all the self-satisfied liberals who want to claim him as one of their own, I’m sorry, but Leonard Cohen belongs to everyone. Once, when we were waiting in the lobby at the doctor’s office, he said: “My National Rifle Association hat came in the mail today. I looked at the tag. I couldn’t believe it: Made in China!”

After I rearranged my jaw on my face from its descent to the floor, I said, “You’re an N.R.A. member?”

He kept staring straight ahead. “Let’s keep that between us,” he said.

I think of that episode now, during our current historical moment. I have no idea how Jikan would have voted in the past election, but if there was anyone who could hold both extremes in his hand and heart, it was the man who, for the last words on his last album, chose these: “I wish there was a treaty we could sign/… I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.”

For an artist informed by a vision of True Love, opposite forces and peoples are just different kinds of love trying to meet. Jikan sang of and from the longing in this struggle.