How do you become yourself? And when you have found yourself – how do you remain yourself? How do you form your own thoughts and how do you live your own life without standing in the way of someone else’s right to live theirs? The person who with their music planted all these questions in my mind was named Robert Zimmerman, but the world knows him as Bob Dylan. The first of his records that I bought was ”The times they are a changing”, and I bought it for the simple reason that the first man that I loved, loved Dylan. My plan was to learn all the long lyrics by heart and then somewhat casually, drop a quote here and there when we passed each other in the school corridors. To my big surprise, when I sat down in front of the record player and pushed play that first time, the man that I loved was the last thing on my mind. I was enchanted, overwhelmed and engulfed by the music that I heard. Grand words that I did not understand, names I had never heard, tunes that resonated so readily with my soul that I for a moment experienced leaving the surface of the earth. You call it transcendence, to experience something that goes beyond the borders of the material world. My love to Robert Zimmerman brought me to the library and for hours I sat there, 16 years old and perusing old, dusty books. Robert Zimmerman opened a whole new world for me, a world that took me far beyond the four walls of my childhood room - Isabella Lundgren.
