Will We Know Our Masterpiece?

Dearest Rachel –

In a song that I woke up the other day running around in my head, Bob Dylan lamented “all the hours [he’d] spent inside the Coliseum / Dodging lions, and wasting time.” He claimed later on that “some day, ev’rything is gonna be diff’rnt / When I paint my masterpiece.” And while we can’t necessarily spend time lounging around in places like Rome or Brussels, there’s so much in these lines that most people can relate to, in that we find ourselves wasting time throughout so much of our life, and if we could just accomplish that one Great Work (the literal translation of the Latin magnum opus, as you know), everything would be so different.

Of course, Bob Dylan wrote and sang a lot of songs throughout his career, and garnered a incredible number of accolades for his body of work, culminating with a Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2016; probably the only time it’s been given to a songwriter. Somewhere along the way, he’d clearly written a masterpiece – quite likely, several of them, in fact – but it occurs to me to wonder: did he know which ones they were? And was everything really different once he’d recorded them?

I think that, at the time, there was some debate on the subject, and which ones were laden with the most meaning and symbolism as to compel the judges in Stockholm to award him with the honor. We heard a case or two at the time being made for “All Along the Watchtower,” but I’m sure “Rainy Day Woman” (with the infamous line about how “everybody must get stoned!”) probably wasn’t what they had in mind. Then again, it has its own layers of symbolism to it, even if it’s thoroughly unsubtle about it.

Look, I don’t claim to be enough of a devotee of his music to say one way or another; I’m pretty sure there are entire albums of his that I’ve never even bothered to listen to; in fact, in trying to find the version of the song you and I were familiar with, I stumbled upon a couple of very different renditions of the same song (which suggests that he knew this one was actually particularly good, if not necessarily a masterpiece). I know what I’ve enjoyed of his, and and I’ve also listened to stuff that I concluded that one listen was more than enough. So I’m not about to set myself up as the arbiter of what he’s done that’s good, bad or magnificent; I’ll leave that for the musicians and historians to judge. But I don’t need a whole lot of qualifications to venture a guess that they and he would have a fair amount of disagreement as to what should be categorized where.

Of course, from there, it’s a natural transition to bring it from one, singular celebrity to the rest of humanity. Everyone wants to make a mark on the world, to be remembered (hopefully with a certain measure of fondness). But in the meantime, we all spend a lot of time ‘dodging lions’ – be it in the form of others at school, a workplace or out in society in general – precluding ourselves from focusing on making that lasting imprint on the world. Which, of course, we tend to see ourselves as ‘wasting time’ – although any effort that keeps one alive when inaction would be fatal would seem to be much more of a waste of time, since it would be time that one never gets to enjoy at all.

Then again, for all that we spend time planning some Great Work or another, odds are that this lifetime’s worth of work will be overlooked by the vast majority of those we might wish to impress with it. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be attempted, necessarily; if the work is something enjoyable, by all means pour into it.

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married (1912)

We just need to bear in mind that, like the legendary Ozymandias, the supposed masterpieces we create will one day crumble to nothing; some of them even within our lifetimes, given the short attention span of the disposable generation we live in.

Then again, what can fall at a moment’s notice can, unlike proverbial Rome, be built in a moment, as well. We live in a memetic age; a single image can embed a person into the public consciousness, regardless of their long-time, ongoing efforts in a completely different direction. A little boy, for instance, frustrated at his attempts at building a sand castle, clutched a handful of the noncompliant stuff as a parent snapped a picture of him, and somehow became a symbol of determination toward success.

So a moment’s heroism or a moment’s misstep could define anyone, and become the ‘masterpiece’ that they neither expected nor bargained for. Meanwhile, all the time and effort poured into one’s life’s work may yet amount to nothing – and in the grand scheme of things, given that it’s all built in a tiny little corner of a cosmic dust mote, it will, sooner rather than later. Everything is mortal, everything will be destroyed, eventually.

The only thing left to us is our soul, and the souls that we touch. But as we don’t see them, and don’t know how to paint on or carve them, we don’t think about them as monuments in the here and now. How can they reflect ourselves to others, when we don’t see them ourselves? And to be honest, I don’t have an answer to that, honey. Maybe souls look different to you, and you can see the fingerprints of everyone you touched or touched you? I can only guess.

Still, with that in mind, I have to be careful; I’m sure I’ve chipped a few souls carelessly along the way, spilled paint on a few others. I should want to minimize that. To that end, if you could keep an eye on me, and guide my tools as I work – however I do so – I’d appreciate it.