I'm currently rereading Bob Dylan's autobigraphy and it's inspiring me more than any philosophy book I've read in years. Inspiring me to write, to play music, to get up and leave, and just generally making me restless.
You get this great sense out of reading Dylan’s autobiography that he had an insatiable thirst for learning. In some way, you sense that to him, living life to its fullest potential meant creating as diverse and colourful an identity as one possibly could, by observing, imitating, absorbing everything you encounter that’s of any interest to you, anything you find original and fascinating, and then toying with it, shaping it some more, pounding it like dough, really getting your knuckles stuck in there until you’ve managed to turn it into something, well… Your own. Although precisely what “your own” means, I don’t really know.
But Dylan, clearly driven into momentum by reading On The Road, wanted to go into every big city out there like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything in his path, drinking the Mississippi dry. If something was happening out there or if someone had a new trick up their sleeve, he wanted to know about it, wanted to be there when the trick was being invented, if he could, wanted to be present in the moment and then move on as fast as he could, like some hungry monster devouring town after town and needing a metropolis to satiate his hunger now. I can almost see him with fire in his eyes as he grows bloated with life, shoving more into his mouth when it’s already crammed full of building and shacks and people with juice running in purple streams all down his chin and way down his shirt, which is itself already bursting like the Incredible Hulk.
