励志偶像鲍勃•迪伦？

    鲍勃•迪伦能够激励人心吗？作为资深迪伦粉丝，我的答案是确定无疑。上世纪80年代初期，我还是一名少年吉他迷。那时我就开始听迪伦的音乐。当时我发现了《放任自流的鲍勃•迪伦》（The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan），这张专辑在我出生前两年发行。我会坐在当时所念寄宿学校的宿舍里，在自己的先锋卡带机上着魔似地按倒带和播放键，直到搞清楚迪伦在写给前女友的甜苦情歌《不必多想，一切会好》（Don't Think Twice, It's All Right）中所使用的弹拨技巧。

    当时我的情感经历还是一张白纸，所以这首歌为何会对我具有如此大的感染力，原因并不明显。原因并不是因为迪伦是我那一代人的声音。当然，前提是这个词如果可以拿来描述我们这拨成长于里根时代、远离政治的预科生的话。但是，跟大多数同龄人一样，我梦想着有一天能够在全世界留下自己的印记。迪伦在那方面似乎很有一套，读一读他在上世纪60年代以及之后的功绩，无论是从诚挚的民谣歌手到愤怒的摇滚歌手，从暗讽的嬉皮士到和悦的讲述者，还是从圣愚到褪色的蓝调乐手，他看起来总能领先同代人一步。我十分欣赏他这一点。像所有伟大的演员一样，迪伦在扮演每一个角色时都具有绝对的说服力，但接着他就又转移到新的角色中去了。

    当然，迪伦的角色诠释之所以有趣，只是因为他的音乐非常伟大。我从高中毕业已近30年，当我听到极具超现实主义风格的《地下乡愁蓝调》（Subterranean Homesick Blues）、阿尔•库珀在《像一块滚石》（Like A Rolling Stone）开篇小节那高亢的电子琴前奏、迪伦在《弱者的歌谣》（Ballad of a Thin Man）中猛烈地诘问琼斯先生、自己从《血之轨迹》（Blood on the Tracks）——插一句，这是我买过的分手主题专辑中最棒的一张——任意挑选一段进行弹奏，我仍然会感到兴奋。

    在我最喜爱的一首歌曲中，迪伦写道：“当救护车已经远去，最后唯一剩下的声响，只有灰姑娘，在那条荒凉小街上，默默地扫地。”我从未走过那《荒凉小街》（Desolation Row），而迪伦自己也没有。但对我来说，它就跟《阿尔丁森林》（The Forest of Arden），或简•奥斯汀笔下摄政时期英国的村落和庄园，或托马斯•品钦笔下的占领区一样真实。在我心目中，这些虚构的地方在某种程度上比我前往杂货店时走过的街道更为真实，因为我更加关心前者。

    所以没错，迪伦确实激励了我。但他的这种激励是否是那种予人动力、励志自助的激励呢？作为一位文化人物，鲍勃•迪伦是否能够跟霍雷肖•阿尔杰、戴尔•卡耐基、托尼•罗宾斯、史蒂芬•柯维以及奥普拉•温弗瑞这些人相提并论？我们是否应该参照迪伦的生活和工作来寻找结交朋友、影响他人以及如何谋生这些问题的答案呢？

    是的，财经网站市场观察（MarketWatch.com）的专栏作家乔恩•弗里德曼就是这种观点。他在《忘记今天：鲍勃•迪伦在（再）发明创造、远离怀疑论者以及发起个人革命上的天赋》（Forget About Today: Bob Dylan's Genius For (Re)Invention, Shunning the Naysayers, and Creating a Personal Revolution）一书中写道：“我认为，凭着他那不可思议的天赋，迪伦能够向人们提供人生教益。弗里德曼试图通过活泼、简短的章节来证明自己的观点，这些章节从迪伦那载入史册的漫长音乐生涯中截取特定的片段，并从中提取出道德教益。

    Is Bob Dylan inspiring? As a lifelong Dylan fan, my answer is yes, absolutely. I started listening to Dylan as a teenage guitar nerd in the early 1980s, when I discovered The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album released two years before my birth. I would sit in my dorm room at boarding school, obsessively hitting rewind-play on my Pioneer cassette deck until I figured out the picking pattern that Dylan used in "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," his bittersweet sendoff to an ex-lover.

    I had zero romantic experience at the time, so it's not obvious why that particular song affected me so much. It's not like Dylan was the voice of my generation, if you can apply that portentous word to a bunch of politically disengaged preppy kids growing up in the Reagan era. But like most teenagers, I dreamed about one day putting my mark on the world. Dylan seemed cool that way: Reading about his exploits in the Sixties and later, I loved how he always seemed to stay at least one step ahead of his own generation, mutating from earnest folkie to angry rocker, from snide hipster to genial country raconteur, from holy fool to weathered bluesman. Like all great actors, he inhabited each new role with absolute conviction and then moved on to the next one.

    Dylan's role-playing is only interesting, of course, because his music is so strong. I've been out of high school for nearly 30 years, and I still get excited when I hear the breakneck surrealism of "Subterranean Homesick Blues", or when Al Kooper's towering organ riff kicks in during the opening bars of "Like A Rolling Stone," or when Dylan savages the hapless Mr. Jones in "Ballad of a Thin Man," or when I play anything off Blood on the Tracks, for my money the best breakup album of all time.

    In one of my favorite Dylan songs, he writes: "And the only sound that's left/After the ambulances go/Is Cinderella sweeping up/On Desolation Row." I've never walked down Desolation Row, and neither has Dylan. But it's just as real to me as the Forest of Arden, or the villages and manor houses of Jane Austen's Regency England, or Thomas Pynchon's Zone. In some ways, these fictional places seem more real than the physical streets that I navigate on my way to the grocery store, because I care about them more.

    So yeah, Dylan inspires me. But is he inspiring in a motivational, self-help-ish kind of way? As a cultural figure, does he belong on the same list as Horatio Alger, Dale Carnegie, Tony Robbins, Steven Covey, and Oprah Winfrey? Should we consult Dylan's life and work for answers on how to win friends, influence people, and locate our cheese?

    Yes, argues MarketWatch.com columnist Jon Friedman. "I think Dylan can teach people life lessons based on his mysterious genius," he writes on page one of Forget About Today: Bob Dylan's Genius For (Re)Invention, Shunning the Naysayers, and Creating a Personal Revolution.Friedman attempts to prove his case with short, zippy chapters that extract morals from particular episodes in Dylan's long and relentlessly chronicled career.