8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. 20 minutes from my hometown of Yonkers, an hour from my new home of Yale. The lights go down as the first movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony plays from the PA system. The audience of 1800 erupts in rapturous applause. As I am frantically clapping, screaming and crying, the man of the evening waltzes onto the stage. The 82-year old Nobel Prize winner, philosopher of modern song, voice for the outcasts and skeptics of the American spirit, the man I have revered for nearly a decade has arrived. Seeing Bob Dylan in the flesh for the second time in my life is the surreal, out-of-body experience I need, especially in my first semester of university.
It is August, and I am arriving at a lecture hall far below the stairs of the Humanities Quadrangle. Plato and Gilgamesh shroud my mind, and the Hebrew Bible is somewhere in the back knocking on the front door; hours in attempt of pouring over their meaning weigh heavily over me. The lecture hall’s interior is a lowly-lit labyrinth of nervous, but enthusiastic students, full of an inviting presence that I did not previously associate with Directed Studies.