Admissions essay: Shai Chester

The music of Bob Dylan has been the leitmotif of my high school experience. When I started boarding in Manhattan back in ninth grade, the wild disregard for time and space in the song “Tangled Up in Blue” helped me weather the transition. As I grew older and more idealistic, the contempt of youthful fundamentalism expressed in “My Back Pages” steered me away from the allure of black-and-white thinking. Yet as much as I enjoyed listening to recordings of Dylan’s music, I still yearned to hear him live. I imagined that encountering Bob Dylan in person would be akin to meeting a long-lost ancestor, someone whose genetic traits, like Dylan’s lyrics, had unknowingly influenced my most basic development. I finally had that opportunity last winter when Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” swung around to New York City.

Walking into a large-scale concert for the first time, I had visions of a somber audience listening to a tuxedo-clad virtuoso playing at a volume appropriate to his distinguished status. The reality was slightly more deafening. I spent the first twenty minutes of the show with my fingers firmly wedged into my ears to the amusement of the wilted flower-children surrounding me. Even as the waves of noise finally began to register in my mind as music, I still found the familiar tunes disconcerting. The voice of Dylan that I knew and loved was the youthfully swinging whine of his prime, not this age-ravaged monotone that so eerily evoked my synagogue’s elderly cantor. Rationalizing that these bad vibes were merely a function of my remote seat, I began to discreetly edge closer to the stage.

After a series of stealthy acrobatics I reached my destination, just a few rows away from the man whose music had defined the last three years of my life. My rapture was cut short, however, by a tipsy giggle to my right. I turned to discover a pair of slowly gyrating twentysomethings, to whom the sublime melody was clearly serving as nothing more than a primitive tattoo to their languid foreplay. Troubled by their frivolity, I turned back to my idol, certain to find my displeasure reflected by him. For one brief moment I saw Dylan’s eyes rise from his keyboard, pass over the sacrilege, me, then the rest of the mob, only to return, uninterested, to his instrument. I suddenly grasped the terrible reality: the Dylan I had created in my mind, the shaper of my deepest convictions, was completely imaginary. The real Dylan was a stranger to whom my personal perceptions were no more valid than the drunken pair’s dancing.

It was not until the drive home that I reconsidered my dismal conclusion. True, my mental image of Dylan did not correlate to the man I had heard in concert, but that did not necessarily make my impression of him meaningless. After all, does the profundity of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar depend on the historical accuracy of his portrayal? The undeniable fact is that there exists a concept I call “Bob Dylan” that expresses my soul, consoles my angst, and continues to guide me to this day. And to me, that is all that matters.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.