Pictured above is Jim Windolf.
As I mentioned a short while back, in one of these blog postings, Windolf is an editor for The New York Times. He has also just written his first book - a book about The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Windolf's book documents their amazingly intense interactions, interactions which have been much more extensive than I ever knew - and also much more profound. Windolf's book is titled, Where The Music Had To Go.
On Pages 306 and 307, right near the end of his book, Windolf speaks about his personal understanding of life, and of the meaning of life. "Life," Windolf says, "is wonderful and horrible. The hours may pass sweetly, but we know from an early age that we're under a death sentence." Artists, Windolf contends, "record it all from deep inside experience and thought." He honors and celebrates how both Dylan and The Beatles have done just that - individually, and sometimes together.
The following observation immediately follows Windolf's statements about life, and about how artists experience and react to it:
"An artist tells the awful truth simply to tell it and to make a genuine connection with other people."
Windolf's statement about what he calls the "awful truth" about life, took me aback. I certainly can't disagree that we learn - and usually early, as Windolf says - that we're all going to have to die. I have made exactly that point repeatedly in my sixteen years of writing my daily commentaries in this blog. Memento Mori is the phrase I have most often used to deliver this reminder.
However, when you click that "Memento Mori" link, above, and visit my blog posting from 2021, you will find that the "Memento Mori" reminder that we must die is supposed to be a message of "comfort."
The word "awful" is what takes me aback, I think, in what Windolf says right at the end of his book.
Merriam-Webster lists the following as the very first definition of "awful."
(1) - extremely disagreeable or objectionable
But... (and this definition is not the one that usually comes to mind) "awful" can also mean:
(3) - "inspiring awe."
If that's what "awful" means, in what Windolf writes, my immediate reaction to his statement about the "awful truth" of our life can be set aside. In fact, I deeply believe that the "truth" we most need to recognize about our life is that it does present us, in fact, with an "awe-filled" truth, and not an "awful" truth, as that word "awful" is most commonly used.
What Windolf reports in his book really does fill the reader - with me, at least - with a sense of "awe" at what both Dylan and The Beatles have done with their music. Their music, so much of it, is a revelation of how important, and wonderful, it is to have been permitted to be alive in this world of celebration, challenge, and woe.
This world of celebration most of all!
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