For Writers and Readers

Sometimes I go to YouTube because a song comes to mind and I want to hear it. On one of these excursions, I noticed a link to a 1965 interview with Bob Dylan. It was quite long, fifty-some minutes. I watched for a few minutes a day, allowing plenty of time to reflect, and my takeaway was this: people (including myself) who back then considered Mr. Dylan a sort of wise guy who wouldn't give straight answers were all wrong. What he was doing was trying to answer honestly in the face of lots of pressure to put on an act.

Then I watched another interview, this one with Robbie Robertson, leader of The Band, who accompanied Bob D. while folk music fans who saw themselves as purists were castigating him for going electric rather than holding to the acoustic folk tradition. The picture Mr. Robinson drew of Bob was of a guy who largely disregarded criticism because he fully believed in himself, the path he chose, and his art.

I read a book called The Introvert Advantage, which portrays us introverts as needing sufficient down time to gain energy by resting, contemplating or at least getting away from all the world's noise. And I remembered when my friend Emanuel told about working as a bodyguard on a tour with Mr. Dylan. He described Bob D. as a cordial but quiet fellow who spent most of his off-duty time alone in his trailer.

In all, I have come to believe that Bob Dylan is a supremely wise introvert who has all along understood that the way to make the most out of his artistic gifts is to be himself, resisting the call of the world to make him something else, and that to do so, he needs to live in accord with his introvert nature, allowing time to gather and reflect on whatever, and then to express himself accordingly. Which earned him, against all odds and all detractors, the Nobel Prize for Literature.