Dylan on Aging

Bob Dylan squeezed gobs of mileage out of his poetic license. He was so palpably gleeful to let listeners Rorschach his lyrics that he could came off like Exhibit A of the old slogan "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

But I must concede that some of his thin, vague images — like "the answer blowing in the wind" — do stick with a person. Useful framings are made more accessible. And that's a high aim of art, so I oughtn't complain.

A new NY Times interview upon Dylan's 85th birthday shows that he remains gratuitously ellipitcal, but the points he's slipperily encircling seem more fully-formed. Even, shockingly, kind of sharp.

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t; it stands still. We’re the ones that move.