Bob Dylan turns seventy today.


I first heard a Bob Dylan song in the summer of 1963, when I was 13. 
It was Peter, Paul and Mary's cover of “Blowin' In the Wind”.  Just
about everybody heard that version of the song in the summer of 1963 —
it made it to number 2 on the Billboard charts and got lots of radio
play.

In the Fall of that year I went off to boarding school and a classmate
had brought with him an LP of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.  That was the
first Dylan album I ever heard.

So from the onset of puberty until today, Bob Dylan has been with me.  He helped me grow up when I was a teenager, he helped me get
old.  He helped me with belief and with unbelief.

Most of all he helped me with the problem of losing things.  All of
life is about losing things — loves, innocence, friends, dreams.  In
the end, we lose everything, in that pine box for all eternity.  And
this is cool — it's what we're here to do.  Lose.  “The stars are
threshed, as souls are threshed from their husks,” is how William Blake
put it.  Dylan said, “Just when you think you've lost everything, you
find out you can always lose a little more.”


The world, especially the modern world, tells us we can have
everything.  In truth, we can have nothing, except what's left when
we've lost everything.  Dylan sings about what that is, too.