"Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize": a Keynote Address by Christopher Ricks

hello thank you for coming to our grand finale professor Rix has asked me to make his introduction short and sweet so I'm going to sure not sweet professor Rix is of course when the finest critics and scholars of poetry in the English language his many books and scholarly editions have shaped our understanding of literature and its importance his book on Dylan has deepened our understanding of a great artist and expanded the ways in which we think about art the literature of course I could go on and on about that but I won't but I do want to mention his importance to the AL scw it is impossible to exaggerate he embodies the organization and his extraordinary dedication and generosity are part of the AL CW's life's blood join me in welcoming professor Rix thank you very much thank you we are all suspicious of the modesty tapas nevertheless it is not modesty that makes me want to say that the evening should have ended with that which we've just heard I cannot think of a better way to end the conference than with art which is even more important and better than the humanities and what we had tonight was an extraordinary vacation of an artist by an artist and the extraordinary reminder of something which is relevant to what I want to talk about which is Dylan's being or not being opposite to the Nobel Prize and so on this because as we know the medium of drama is not words what we saw tonight is an art of which the medium is words wonderfully reimagined recreated in the spirit of Ezra Pound saying that the most important criticism is always the subsequent creation that the greatest the greatest criticism of Jane Austen is by George Eliot in her work and the greatest criticism of Milton is what Pope found still to do animated by and dissenting from so what we had tonight was I think a quite extraordinary realization of what it is to have a medium like drama of which supremely tonight a key constituent was the body I'd only have seen a performance of such extraordinary speed and intensity and realization of all the body languages absolutely shortly the word body language feels quite an era compared to what we were allowed to experience tonight I thought it was extremely moving and we and I I was I'm exhausted by it we are also exhausted by the Honourable retractions of the conference itself and so on ain't it just like the night to play tricks when we're trying to be it is just like the night to pretend to be young the night is not young why I asked earnest to get to be brief and so on but let me please pay a tribute to what we have experienced as it were half an hour ago I it will stay I can't imagine ever forgetting it and there have been there are wonderfully valuable things which honorably fade there be something wrong I think with any of us if we didn't remember and relive what we saw tonight pay extraordinary The Times Literary Supplement earlier this month managed to return to Dylan and the Nobel Prize and they said this this year's award is of course a response to the fiasco of last year well I'm one of the people who didn't think it was a fiasco I'll just I'll just quote to you since I haven't changed my mind what it was I sent briefly to people who quite a lot of people asked my opinion which was very flattering as on I reassured them that I had not myself won the Nobel Prize and so on there it was rather wonderful to go to Stockholm at the invitation of the Swedish Academy and be photographed on some great beam up about the dinner and to be one of the 400 bald heads that you can see in the photo in a photo or two and some that was on across December the 11th year ago the things I wanted to say of these pries and I've just rehearsed them because I say I haven't changed my mind reminders since Dylan's art among other things is the head of a great reminder rather than the spirit of dr. Johnson saying that men more often require to be reminded than informed first that every artists in so far as he is great he or she is great as well as original has had the task of creating the taste by which is to be enjoyed and that is Wordsworth on originality ingenious and it is of course Dylan's redefining in in crucial ways what it is to sing as Marlon Brando redefined what it is to act the people who thought that Brando could not act were not stupid though they needed to be why's in the matter and so on second that the art of song is triple it's a compound as combination of a voice and of music and of words it never makes sense to ask which is more important since all three are obligatory none of them is a sufficient condition all three unnecessary conditions of the art of song and Devon mostly manages to steer away of any idea about which is more important that is hydrogen/oxygen irrespective of or they're in the same ratio are equally important any compound depends on the act of living presence within it of all of the things that go to make it so it wouldn't make sense to say h2so4 or any of the constituents of it more important than the others so that has to fall away I think there is a danger of course in any decision taken by any committee and that includes the Nobel Prize I find myself saying that most of the time the words are an exceptionally powerful and beautiful Dylan song most of the time it is wise to think of literature as existing in words very especially or in words alone but any notion of literature by which Shakespeare would not be an eligible is a producer would be a pretty crass notion of what literature is and Dylan is quite right when he sent the message in December to the Swedish Academy Patti Smith you'll remember saying hard rain she forgot the words she or she wonderfully couldn't bring herself to sing the words she was instantly and totally loved by everybody who was present it was a very extraordinary and if it if she'd been a bad person like and then I will name I could name bad people she would have pretended to forget the words because the writer of total love and delight in her being was achieved by her failing to sing it it was as if there was an extraordinary admission by her the distance or the wonderful of him drascalo sing it one that she's saying it what greater tribute could there be than not being able to remember the words of a song which talks about what it is to stumble oh and I'll know the words well before I start seeing but you didn't Pattie and uh and there was something there was something very very beautiful of her turning and saying can I start it again and the request being made of a king most of us are just asking the chairman of a committee whether we can go back to the beginning of summer but that it was that it was genuinely moving and wonderful and a vey extraordinary performance of the song but I harp on that because of the way in which the the belief mostly is wise that literature can exists in words but it does not exist in words alone and it certainly doesn't in song and it doesn't of course in drama and this if I repeat my very very gratitude to the pertinence of the experience we had this evening with the turning of something which is not a play into a play of a certain kind so a performer Dylan is necessary in the business and the game of playing timing against rhyming all the cadences the voicing the rhythmical draping and changing they don't of course make a song superior to a poem but they make it's coming to us a different matter from the way in which a poem on the page would come to us so the example I wanted to give last year was when Eliot wrote to the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage the medium is totally words it's just totally within words and the cadences of words unsupported by any other medium when Dylan sings condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting it is an exceptionally beautiful line it has the inexplicable 'ti of great poetry in my opinion is really extraordinary a moment condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting absol a very very deep insight involving the necessity for us to be able to maintain ourselves between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis as ensign says and that includes the mystery of such phrasing but his medium at that point is words and music and his voice worth the Eliott medium it's easily quite clear that that Eliot's line is alive in in Dylan's lines and that as we all know we can we can offer in ten or twelve instances quite promptly of alias presence within Dylan and not just because of Ezra Pound and TS Eliot fighting in the captain's power while Calypso Sega's laugh at them and Fisher and how flowers between the windows of the ceiling lovely mermaids flood and so that extraordinary conjunction of the wasteland with the love song of Jennifer prufrock and that extraordinary vision of modernism as like the Titanic I mean an immensely extraordinary venture which Philip Larkin is not alone in thinking was hideously doomed in certain ways that is post modernism has not been a triumph except insofar as it has really ignored modernism modernity has been a very different story and so on so I love the exchange very early which everybody would know Dylan the interviewer Hawaii you doing what you're doing pause I love the pause that he's very good you shouldn't be able to beat Italy to answer the question why are you doing what you are doing pause because I don't know anything else to do I'm good at it how would you describe it I'm an artist I try to create art now I think it has great beauty for me it's very very simple it's very direct it doesn't mess about with any kind of palliation zorp or Turing's i think it very very fine now he hasn't just tried to create he has created to answer would seem to me the Nobel Citation you remember speaks of Dylan's having created new poetic experiences within the great American soul revolution well not only within that I mean within very importantly Scottish and English and Irish traditions as well as the great European ones and of course our other European things and so so I I liked very much the words that Dillon sent for December I it was a a happy thing that the American Academy the American ambassador to Sweden as a woman that that there was there was something very important in that listen to me she uttered his words without pretending to be him I thought it was very well done all of that I liked very much that the first example of the Nobel Prize winners whom he had read when he was young was Kipling and he has his Kipling very beauty culture playing in interviews more than once and he uses things he has in common with Kipling an extraordinary range of constituencies or readerships or audiences available to him and so the second person he cited was sure and of course he's quite right that if you give it to shore and it must have been given to shore as a playwright preeminent and and man of letters then you're immediately thinking of course of Beckett whom he didn't mention or or a Pinter or of dairy fo so the a lot of the the petty spitefulness' of the poet's they did rally into very prompt petit unified spitefulness' about his having others and it was a very extraordinary because after all there's so many things for which there is no Nobel Prizes tall fortunately there isn't one for clear story criticism but as we know who would win it then you have to think hard for a moment and nor to agree there just a good job there isn't one all right we could talk afterwards about the prime candidate who would be sure to get it but of course there isn't a Nobel Prize for music there's nobel prize for acting as though acting were not a great art there isn't an XO you run through it so there is something rather awful about the way in which instead of being immensely and unexpectedly grateful for their beam onto literature at all the poets all rallied and one of the poet said I sympathize with a Nobel Prize people it's hard to read now I mean the kind of inanity of that kind of response Alex beam who wrote about this for the Boston Globe said immediately it's very hard to read your book he's dead who replies to the pirate who were to come up with this idea and so anyway those patchiness azar a bad thing Dylan's Dylan's words which were course to be distinguished from his literary critical talk about all's Quiet on the Western Front about Moby Dick and about the artist see that's different from what he sent in December and so on and he wouldn't have got a prize for their bail a Nobel Prize for literary criticism on the basis of what he had to say about maybe day but the words that he sent you may remember were he says began to think about Shakespeare the thought that he was writing literature wouldn't have occurred to him now that's a risky thing to say I think certainly create art Shakespeare thinks a lot about whether it's art but it is true that is it literature isn't really a question that seems to me to be raised for instance in two sonnets and so on you remember Dylan's example of what Shakespeare will have been thinking is do I really want to set this in Denmark now it is it's a terrifically good thing to her here read in Stockholm and so on that is Hamlet is of course about war within Scandinavia there is still a war with in Scandinavia about the partner Sweden paid in the second world war Danes are not gonna forgive in order the Norwegians many of the things that the Swedes did in the Second World War including their pretense of neutrality I'm not sure what the rights and wrongs of this British drew I've been married to somebody Danish and I haven't yet been married to anybody who's Swedish or Norwegian so it's a I tend to side with the with the Danes in the matter but you but there was a certain free saw ran through the ceremony little occasion when do I really want to set as in Denmark is being discussed or is being received by Stockholm and so on the Dylan himself on this this very beautiful sentence or two I don't know if I'd call myself a poet or not I would like to but I'm not really qualified I think to make that decision I like the syntax of that you read it at first as if I'm not really qualified but he wants it maybe I'm not really qualified to make that decision it's not that I'm not really qualified to be a poet that would be for other people to decide and why not because I come in on such a backdoor that surveyed Dylan s thing to do with prepositions as one of things that that he learns from Eliot not from Eliot alone the extraordinary power of changing a preposition to come in by or through a back door to come in on his knee diem which doesn't normally lead to that isn't that right it comes that you come in on a ticket or sub saucy coming on a back door that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a Keats or TS Eliot would really think of my stuff I like the way mixes overall but Frost a piece but then says TSL he doesn't say o TS Eliot because you're coming towards something which is Robert harder as it were to imagine because of Eliot's extraordinary originality and powers of innovation the Eliot acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize is very strong in I never properly thought about it and never probably thought about it what it was that Eliot was intimating in 1948 I hadn't thought about what it means for him to say my business is with words yet the words were beyond my command now beyond your command is a very powerful thing in in Dylan and not only the way those words themselves and the times they were changing the words were beyond my command and actually words themselves but the expression of one's feelings Eliot says calls for resources which language cannot supply so that is all root it seems to me to think about what would be the gains at least on occasion of supplying what language cannot supply that is what the human voice can do as we heard tonight and what timing can do again I want one I want us to bear in mind the extraordinary happy relevance of tonight the split-second timing of what we saw had a musical precision it was really extraordinary and it clearly flowed not from any conscious decision about exactly how long something right it flowed from the really deep conviction of the meaning and worth of what was being presented to us so it was it seems to me like at the point that I and other people want to make about doing that the art is like that of a great athlete who must combine immensely wise instincts with the great training and it doesn't make sense to think of the great athlete as calculating effects that as they passed beyond the world of calculation it's Dylan saying you've got to program your brain not to get in the way that is you have to it's not that you've got to find out how not to use your brain you've got to program it so that it doesn't get in the way and that has to do of course with conscious and unconscious intentions that there is no way of knowing where the Dylan has in mind and another question put to him would not I think should not honorably be answered when do you sing is the highways for gamblers better use your sense what sense is there that a gambler is a better that is a gambler or somebody who makes a bet every pun is a bet every rhyme is a bet takes a risk the important part of what we watched tonight like I don't know where the Dylan is aware what the word better does if you have it immediately following the word gambler I do know though that when he says that his song has lead there and lives he is in I'm with Blake saying I called the mine though they are not mine or with heat saying that the these are not conscious and deliberate effects he doesn't realize what he has done until after he has done it afterwards confirmed in a dozen features of propriety going with the idea that it is as if he didn't write these lines very extraordinary Dylan's saying when asked whether he would be able to create again work with the majesty and scale of like a rolling stone or the lonesome death of Haddie Carol said about like erroneous and humbly quoted this reminded us of it recently I don't know that person anymore I can argue verbatim but thinking of his young self as not no longer simply inhabiting him and so on not cut off not disinherited disappear anyway this seems to me part of the whole world of the questions about whether it makes sense to judge all this to be literature in terms of the perpetual site alteration of language which Eliot thought was especially the mark of the great artist with words we've all got I imagine our favourites from within the moments in Dylan I think the verb to foundation is a wonderful creation foundation deep somehow is a very extraordinary thing to do with the word foundation I think the laws to abide is very very different from to abide by the laws the laws to abide you turn abide into a transitive verb in the way in which Pope does hesitate into a transitive verb just hint a fault and hesitate dislike the ordinary thing of course is that you only hesitate and Addison is able to turn this into something transitive hesitate just like Dylan does that with you who philosophize disk that is you can philosophize or you can be philosophical about but philosophize is not ordinarily a transitive verb to philosophize disgrace means to spin shamefully abstract felissa quasi philosophical arguments about things that should not be happening or allowed and moreover then to be resolvable about them because after all they're not they're not in your backyard or even in your immediate vicinity in other ways the verb to prophesize is one of those isn't who prophesize with your pen prophesize one thing prophesizing is something else rather as there's difference in our line of work between being professional and being professionalized just as those of us who are at the amateur wing of literary studies as I am should not be caught out being amateurish so we should be skeptical about colleagues who don't know the difference between being professional and being professionalized that is the speed with which what was going to be a conversation about John Barrowman turns into the discussion of whether or not you could get a job at the University as a peer + institution as my university keep saying a beer glass is the only outcomes that are alright at BU our tenure track or tenured appointments in beer + institutions these are the words of the people the Philistines and and and I may say mendacious Philistines who run my universe not mine and now I mean him it is to me absolutely extraordinary what has happened and it's not the influence of President Trump and in these things and today and Trump is part of the very extraordinary it's a couldn't sorry I really stop away but um we got so much to talk about and much to reminisce do you can trim in this thing you see no you can we've got a lot of reminiscing to do but we haven't got much to reminisce it's quite lovely what it does the the extraordinary never a relaxing relaxation of intelligence always an intensely relaxed intelligence very strongly feeds all of these and that as I say I'm sure we have our favorites for them you feel to Mon you feel terment you feel like no Ning yeah you feel tomato temptations made fires out the door you follow find yourself at war watch it waterfalls a bit ear or you feel to moan but I'm like before you discover you'd be just one more person crying this extraordinary huge stanza of his with person crying biding its time to rhyme with this alright my man you sighing and on now you feel to moan we all know exactly what it means it would be very hard to as evil people say parse it these the terrible pedagogical terms and so on but you feel to moan you feel like moaning you want to moan something is happening by which a quite new light on what the relation of feeling to utterances which is again part of part of I thought what I found two extraordinary tonight and Jim angle this morning made repeated and always pertinent use of Coleridge's out to nurses I hadn't ever noticed that Coleridge thinks of these things as as the creation of an out Ernest it's in it's in and it's out and then the out this is going to be brought in that being pre-eminently a matter of timing and of it and of extraordinary attention I'll skip that then excuse me so I I would like to I just want to say something about tarantula a tarantula has always mattered more to me than to some other people because of its value as evidence the Dylan has read certain things I mean it's an immense II it's the immensely well-read book it's not read as much as it should be because the bad bits in it or a more obvious than the good thing settings on I don't know how many people really read tarantula very often what is he doing what is he doing here and super freak pushing and shoving amazing totally amazing and I think I'm gonna do April also is a cruel month and how you like your blue eyed boy now now what I think is very good in that is the April or so is itself a Elliott life I mean that is to take something from somebody and interfere with the rhythm or completion of it when lovely woman Stoops to Folly and and that's when the line ending have not been lovely woman suit Shefali and then the next line is hand April or so is very intriguing because it's a question why you can with certain units of time say or so after them but you can't really do it in the same way with a month which is a unit of time April or so feels odd in the way in which 11:15 or so does not feel odd so it's it's it's playing whimsically or playfully Oh essentially amicably with Elliott I like Elliott Dillon says in chronicles I want to read earlier and so now that important moment in in chronicles so and even also I suddenly noticed that earlier in in his letters love saying or so which is odd because you think of him as everything to do with you know restricted to what precisely and so on also nineteen no say 1910 also nineteen eighteen or so at the age of 40 or so only 50 or so next ten days or so twenty years or so there's something in Elias cast a mind which I'm not saying Dillon knows and is alluding to but which coincidence take what you who have gathered from coincidence it is a coincidence about also buddy turns out I think to be germane ask her for a paper favor and she gives you a rhenium poem who gave us geranium poems but TS Eliot except that Eliot will say mustn't write any more poems with geraniums in them because everybody knows they're really laugh fogs so there's this exception who who first gives us dreamed therefore and very very beautifully important waiting in line for their geranium kiss and other geranium moments other Dylan those resign from mind the heart of light that's during something quite lovely with the heart of light it seems to me because of the assonance in resign from mind resign is very very powerful in Eliot you remember the line consisting solely of the word resigned and so on Elias very well everyone Dylan's very well read it's well known he's been with the professors who's not shortly or Heather wants our company but that's on that's an honorable position to take he does never I think ingratiate the profession our profession only probably any other profession Bob Dylan missus tarantula Bob Dylan killed by a discarded Oedipus who turned around to investigate a ghost and discovered that the ghost two was more than one person now we wouldn't have had that without the second session of litigating it's not that Elliott is the first to think of a familiar compound ghost but Dylan is familiar with Elliott's creation of a familiar compound ghost and what matters is then the relation of this not just to Dante which matters to do but but to Hamlet because Dylan keeps coming back to what Prince Hamlet is Prince Hamlet he's somewhere on the totem pole Prince Hamlet of his hexagram the intersection of those two of those two shapes which are very light literary allusion those intersections function in that way let me just remind you of this bit of tarantula mother say and it's going to be Hamlet's mother and it's gonna be Coriolanus his mother mother say go in that direction and please do the greatest deed of all time and say I say mother but it's already been done and she say well what else is there for you to do and I say I don't know mother but I'm not going in that direction I'm going in that direction and she say ok but where will you be and I say I don't know mother but I'm not Tom Joad and she say alright then I am NOT your mother Prince Hamlet of his hexagram I don't actually think this is great writing but I think is really revelatory as to what in an awful lot of Elliot again thinking of how Germaine was spoke this morning is suffering that is within somebody which has to found find some way of being outed and being uttered and so on and I think as I said the combination of Coriolanus you've a song like the public speaker the public speaker who may be saying and so on I mean that whole world will be part of the story his moment from chronicles TS Eliot wrote a poem once where there were people walking to and fro and everybody's taking the opposite direction was appearing to be running away that's what it looked like that might and often would come for some time to come now that's strange because there isn't really an air layup poem in which that's quite the story but I put I bring together in that in relation to the other about another direction and I think it's very important because of a general principle that what you have again and again is in art is an axis and not a direction that is the very same word which means this means the opposite the very same punctuation mark which is a spur karma is a bit in the butt in the mouth of the horse it's the same it's exactly the same thing and it can work with function in completely opposite ways and that truth which is in Freud's essay on the the antithetical sense of primal words is one which Dylan is I think a very powerfully aware of all the time I'm almost at the end I I want to just give I want to give one example of a question about Eliot and apply it then to a similar question about Dylan and it has to do with a belief that I have in subtle and some people have to the it's characteristic of great effects in art there's a doubt about whether we are imagining them since the great imaginer who created this forest wants us to cooperate in the act of imagination there's something wrong if it's never in doubt that is Ogden Nash can make great puns of a certain kind be great because they're indubitable but that terrifically limits what you can do with punning the very greatest bunnies are not puns are not indubitable because they so perfectly fit that there's no need to adduce the second sentence and so on so something is happening by which we value the dubiety as to whether it is happening we value the dubiety as to what worth it would bring if it were happening these these are very valuable - bounties because they have to do with play the feeling that to allude is to play homo Luden's is homo Luden's and just as the steering wheel needs a certain play so we need a certain play as to whether we're doing the imagining or he or she is and again again the raises if they seem to me to leave that not tricky not trixie or mysterious exactly but to leave it up for fully cooperative attention of the kind that Diaz Lawrence thought we should master all the time now the example from earlier is what happens to the the typist and the small house agents Clark so let me ride you at the violet hour the evening hour that strives homeward and brings the Sailor home from sea the typist home at tea time clears her brain first it's a Donald baby wrote brilliantly about the syntax of that suddenly clears her breakfast and so on but it is of course brings the Sailor home from sea and then this probably the most dispiriting erotic scene in literature that at least that I that I have ever that I've ever read I mean really very very profoundly disparity and Tom now the the the the the sources just know I'd know the question is how far do you go when you when you turn to Stephenson and Houseman so let me remind you the steam sometime under the wide and starry sky dig the grave and let me lie glad did I live and gladly die and I laid me down with a will this be the verse you grave for me here he lies where he longed to be home is the Sailor home from sea and hunter and from the hill now the question that I have is whether or not glad did I live and gladly die and I laid me down with the will is supposed to relate to the erotic scene or not it is a scene totally without gladness in either of the parties and she does not lay herself down with the will thank God that I know she is she's glad that's over and some pain god I shouldn't say it's on that's over so it will be power here he lies it is how much comes with the illusion and I think we all find as readers and as teachers or as critics that again and again there isn't any doubt in our minds that it's calling upon Hamlet do you see what I'm on you get at it everybody thinks of Polonius in I'm not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be I'm an attendant Lord one that will do to swell a provost are to see nor to you go through that and you and what you find is that there are the intimations of polonius are more than you might have thought he does start a scene or two I mean there were two scenes that quite literally suck the filler let me try to get it properly oh dear I've lost the line for a moment old man great trouble this is Beckett oh man great trouble white world give me the line that ends with that has meticulous in it somebody can do it politic and promise thing politic cautious and meticulous aim time but this was not an act I'm sorry I just genuinely couldn't remember it politic cautious and meticulous spells begins with pol it ends with us and it has o ni in sequence now is that just my being bein clever because I used to love The Times crossword puzzle or is it TS Eliot putting Polonius behind the Arras of the line pol Polonius politic cautious and meticulous pol o ni us and moreover politics the only really the only really fearfully energetic used the word politic in Shakespeare or in perhaps in English literature is a diet of politic worms so there is something wrong horrible about politic cautious and meticulous German and that what I'm getting at is that as part of what we do to that we are in doubt about how much comes worth that I think that and I laid me down with the will is rather horrifyingly grotesquely inappropriate and during so what's happening in the in that scene and rather similarly in Haussmann's retelling of the same poem who mr. hunter from the hill fast in the boundless snare all flesh lies taken at his will now all flesh was taken at his will is the small house agent card except that in some horrible way doesn't even rise to that and we'll be calling people predators at the moment predators are good in comparison with how Harvey has been behaving and that right predators are very vey strained the idea nature needs predation and so on society doesn't need in any way what I wanted to get out of the lot of this is how how much of the original do you follow in some hope that it may or may not be relevant so the Dylan I'll end with the Dylan examples and then take some questions when he sings this is this is for me one of the most beautiful he reminds us of that God don't make promises that he don't keep unlike us God who may promise you don't keep you've got some big dreams baby but not a dream you got to still get sleep when you're gonna wake up when you're gonna wake up when you're gonna wake up strengthen the things that remain now that moment from the book of Revelation everybody agrees is there strengthen the things that remain is one of the great phrases that remain from the King James Bible it very extraordinary and it is strengthened by being a deuced it is I think it's part of what part of the thing that old people think are going wrong is that the things that remain are mostly now despised the really important word to Boston University is an innovation that is tradition is never mentioned or something to be respected everything must be innovative everything must be innovation all the time there's no sense that part of the duty of might be to strengthen the things that remain especially if you can give good grounds for their right to remain not everything should be that is the case should be allowed to remain what I'm interested in is how much of revelation does he want to come with the that line I know thy works that thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead be watchful and strengthen the things which remain that are ready to die for I have not found thy works perfect before God now how much of that does Dillon want I think the Christian songs are they they fine Christian if I want a reminder of Howard as possible for people to be compassionate dispassionate and wise and it nevertheless be Christian I think either of my oldest child here's a Christian though I gave him the they healthy upbringing and then I think of all the ways in which the poems of her but all the Christian songs of Dylan are realizations of a great many things that are they they manifestly good in Christianity but the I have not found thy works perfect before God is tied for me with Dylan saying every one of my songs could be written better this used to bother me but it doesn't anymore there's nothing perfect anywhere so I shouldn't expect myself to be perfect so that goes perfect into expect into perfect and so on with something of a memory of what it is of course to say be therefore perfect even as your father which is in heaven is perfect exactly the kind of terrible admonition to which you must answer neither that you will in all that you won't I take it that anybody who being told in the Gospel according to st. Matthew be therefore perfect said yes I shall certainly be doing that and on it tells you that you better not say yes and you better not say no do not presume one of the thieves were saved do not despair do not presume one of the thieves must and do not despair one of the thieves were saved the remark by central costumers has never been found in a circle Kassadin and which one is tempted always to change the order but you think we're more danger from despairing than from presuming and is it in right is it in rising or falling order and so on Elliott has the epigraph to for Lancelot Andrews our Lord who walkest in the midst of the golden candlesticks removed not we pray thee how can stick out his place but set in order the things which are wanting among us and strengthen those which remain and are ready to die that's the epigraph for the Elliot book again Dylan doesn't need to have seen the title page four for Lancelot handers but we do we do need to think about how much is coming with what is perfectly sufficient if only rather little is coming and the first one now will later be last for the times they are a-changin and and and then of course the reference to fathers and mothers throughout the land and everyone that had forsaken houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my name's sake shall receive an hundredfold but many that are first shall be last and the last shall be first there's more of that is pertinent than I had realized that is I I know as we all know as run as a Matthew how widely do you let do you forage beyond the immediate limits so that the quotation and if there were one way you should do this it would for me be strengthen the things that remain or strengthen the things which remain and more than one version of that I thank you please ask questions if you have some you

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Length: 46min 32sec (2792 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017