I had hoped a few others would have picked up on the question of Dylan's paradoxical "honesty." I alluded to it yesterday, and at least one person responded briefly. I've thought more about it, and would like to see what others have to say.

At the very time that Bob was most effectively hiding his true background and personal past, and living as a fictional character of his own creation, he was probably at his best in conveying some kind of "truth" in his songs.

That is, he was giving voice to a whole gestalt's worth of ideas than huge numbers of young people were sensing with varying degress of coherence, but that no one was yet able to express effectively. Is there some kind of cause-and-effect here, where a certain kind of dishonesty in one aspect of a life actually enables an artist to achieve a another kind of unique truth-telling in his creative work?

One thing Bob said in his interview was that he considered it important to be truthful to oneself and to God, but not necessarily to anyone else -- pointedly, NOT to the press and therefore, by extension, to the public at large. Personally, I believe truthfulness is much more important than that, but Bob's approach seems to have worked for him, on some level -- certainly artistically. Maybe on another level, for his personal happiness, it didn't work all that well.