Within the pre-scientific world, within the blind previous world with its previous language, we had a phrase for these individuals most awake to the sacred surprise of actuality, most able to awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us once we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That phrase was “saint.”

Saints nonetheless stroll our world, although now we’d merely name them heroes, if we acknowledge them in any respect — heroes whose superpower is love.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) — one of many fashionable heroes — explores what makes a saint in a passage from his 1966 novel Stunning Losers (public library).

He writes:

What’s a saint? A saint is somebody who has achieved a distant human risk. It’s not possible to say what that risk is. I believe it has one thing to do with the power of affection. Contact with this power ends in the train of a type of steadiness within the chaos of existence. A saint doesn’t dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have modified way back. I don’t assume {that a} saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there’s something conceited and warlike within the notion of a person setting the universe so as. It’s a type of steadiness that’s his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His monitor is a drawing of the snow in a second of its explicit association with wind and rock. One thing in him so loves the world that he offers himself to the legal guidelines of gravity and likelihood. Removed from flying with the angels, he traces with the constancy of a seismograph needle the state of the stable bloody panorama. His home is harmful and finite, however he’s at residence on this planet. He can love the form of human beings, the fantastic and twisted shapes of the center. It’s good to have amongst us such males*, such balancing monsters of affection.

A yr later, Cohen contemplated what these “balancing monsters of affection” do for us in his music “Sisters of Mercy”:

In case your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They are going to bind you with love that’s sleek and inexperienced as a stem.

Complement with Walter Lippmann’s magnificent meditation on what makes a hero, impressed by Amelia Earhart, then revisit Leonard Cohen on creativity on the finish of life, language and the poetry of presence, democracy’s breakages and redemptions, and when (not) to stop a artistic challenge.