Leonard Cohen is going to die. The French-Canadian Jew who has his finger more closely situated on the pulse of longing and romance than almost any other figure of the last half-century is going to rot and decompose and smell like sulfur and despair. He is 77 years old and has been a smoker as long as anybody can tell—it’s a wonder he’s made it this long. But even though his recent touring gives credence to his seemingly perpetual youth (he skipped gleefully around the stage when I saw him in 2009), he can’t keep it up forever.

A few days ago, it was a Leonard Cohen type of day. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with these. Although his diverse repertoire transcends any face the weather might assume, on this day it was a bit chilly with a breeze just pesky enough to keep your hair constantly blown against the grain. I was walking home from my morning class, puffing a cigarette, with Book of Longing tucked haphazardly in my pocket when I was overcome by the notion that opens this column. I realized that somehow, anyhow, it didn’t matter, I just needed to find a way to tap into the soul which had given me so much, and had so inequitably borne the burdens I asked it to carry with me.

Last month, when accepting the Prince of Asturias Letters Award in Spain, Leonard Cohen made public a story that the great storyteller himself had long kept private. In the early ’60s he saw a flamenco guitarist playing in a park in Montreal. He asked the young man to give him lessons. Despite only being able to communicate in broken French, the man agreed to teach him to play guitar. After several days, the man had succeeded in forcing Cohen’s stubborn fingers to memorize the shapes of six chords. Then, he disappeared. Cohen discovered that the guitarist took his own life shortly after. But those six chords, Cohen admitted to the Spanish Royal Family, formed the basis of every song he ever wrote.

Let’s unpack and romanticize this a bit. Leonard Cohen—forever in devout confraternity with Federico Garcia Lorca, a budding poet and uninterested guitarist—met a gypsy guitarist in a park in Montreal who taught him the secret chords and gave him the medium with which he would touch the lives of millions for the next five decades. It’s a somewhat more credible and certainly much more beautiful version of the Faustian tale of Robert Johnson meeting the Devil at the crossroads and trading his soul for guitar skills. Cohen didn’t trade anything; he presented his soul and was rewarded with the guitar.

After first hearing this story, I couldn’t help but think: What the hell? That’s totally unfair. Cohen was already a renowned poet before he had ever thought to pick up a guitar with any seriousness, and he was taught the mysteries of song by a suicidal gypsy in a Canadian park. Stacked deck. I’m the one who needs to be shown David’s secret chord.

So I settled on the idea of contacting Leonard Cohen. If I couldn’t stumble upon a gypsy in a park to teach me guitar, maybe at least I could harass him until he sued for a restraining order. I stopped on a bench in Nichols Park on my way home to flip through the poems and sketches in Book of Longing. While sitting there, enshrouded in smoke and song, I received a text message from an old friend to whom I had not spoken in nearly a year. It read, “Call me when you can. I have a Leonard Cohen question.”

Obviously struck by this coincidence, I called her immediately. She was nearly hysterical. Apparently she had awoke that morning with the resolution that she must contact Leonard Cohen before he dies. So she did. She reached his manager under the auspice of working on a B.A. on Cohen and needing to get in touch with him. The manager replied to her email. He was willing to facilitate. She was calling me mostly to calm her nerves and coach her through the next steps. She was on the precipice of meeting her gypsy in the park.

In respect for my friend’s privacy, I’ll leave the rest of her story to your imagination. For my part, I immediately gave up the notion of trying to get in touch with the man himself. Where did that leave me? Messy hair, a hacking cough, a well-thumbed book, and an extinguishing cigarette were all that I found in my park in Chicago.

Try as I might, there will be no secret keeper with a guitar and a soul right out of Romancero Gitano. And I’m not sure a restraining order issued in the name of Leonard Cohen’s lawyer amounts to quite the same as the long-term dialogue contained in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet that I had been vaguely hoping for. Anyway, at this point I’ve put so much on Leonard Cohen’s shoulders that at his ripe age, I doubt he could stand to support me any more than he already does. But I can’t shake the feeling that if he dies without passing on his secret, well then maybe “there are no oceans left for scavengers like me.”

Colin Bradley is a second-year in the College majoring in Law, Letters, and Society.