LATE LAST YEAR, a week before his final record was released and not quite four weeks before he died, Leonard Cohen held a press conference at the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles. Dapper in a dark suit, seeking support in his seat from a cane, the 82-year-old fielded questions. With a wit and candor and gentleness and wisdom that felt extraterrestrial, he spoke as though he’d traveled here from a civilization more advanced than our own to offer us a few gifts that could ensure the survival of our species. Near the end, there was a kind of apotheosis. A Japanese reporter asked Cohen about one of the lyrics from the new record’s title song, “You Want It Darker,” in which Cohen sing-speaks, “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready my Lord.”

A Hebrew word that appears in the Old Testament, hineni — הנני : “Here I am” — is said by Moses and Abraham and Isaiah when God appears to ask something of each of them. It’s a declaration not of location but of disposition, of willingness. The reporter wanted to know from Cohen about the moment that inspired the line. “I don’t really know the genesis, the origin,” Cohen began. “That ‘hineni,’ that declaration of readiness no matter what the outcome, that’s a part of everyone’s soul. We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetites to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are willing to serve. So, this is just a part of my nature, and I think everybody else’s nature, to offer oneself at the critical moment when the emergency becomes articulate. It’s only when the emergency becomes articulate that we can locate that willingness to serve.”

The response was a kind of koan, and I should admit some reluctance in offering up my little parse of it here: The main point of sharing it now is so that it might find a home in you as it has in me. Even so, here’s how I hear it: Asked about the inspiration for a particular line for a particular song, Cohen answered, instead, with the most persuasive explanation I’ve encountered of what artistic inspiration might actually involve. At critical moments, from our depths, out of an impulse not for glory, not for wealth, not for fame, not for power, but out of an appetite to serve — serve something larger than ourselves, however one might define it — the emergency inside us finally speaks. Like all emergencies, this one, which I understand Cohen to be saying is a crisis of feeling, could result in casualties. Instead, worded and heard, it becomes a moment when lives might be saved, starting with our own. In Cohen’s vision of inspiration, these moments of articulation aren’t instances of the artist-as-god swooping in from on high. Rather, they are offerings that arise from below, things given from one person experiencing a state of emergency to another, at the critical moment.

As a delivery device for moments of inner emergency, no art form can approach the immediacy of popular song. A novel cannot assault you while you wait in line at the supermarket; a painting cannot reach out and turn your head as you walk on by; a poem’s feet cannot chase you down the street; a movie cannot screen itself. A song, though, can steal upon you in the dark, on a road, far from home, blow out your tires and leave you sobbing, in gratitude, at the wheel. All other art lives and dies in a medium that mandates we engage if we are to receive its gifts. Songs live in the air. Ears don’t have lids that can keep the songs there.