Bob Dylan and Ernest Rutherford, Katherine Mansfield and Bill Gates showed that the world can be changed by daring twentysomethings — a lesson for the Trumpian age.
Bob at Newport
In A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet nails the Dylan voice, the Dylan walk, the Dylan snigger, the Dylan slouch. One complaint: the sharpness of his cheekbones. The visage that peeks out from behind a sheepskin collar on the cover of the real Bob Dylan’s debut album is so baby-faced it might belong to a King’s College choirboy at an Otara nightclub.
Dylan — the fact staggers any reasonable person — was 21 when he wrote A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, that alluring masterpiece of prophecy and allusion. His sequence of culture-transforming, for-the-ages albums — The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde — was completed by his mid-twenties. My very favourite "Mr. Tambourine Man" had lyrics from January 1964 that he threw away. Found in a garbage bin they were sold in 2022 for US$500,000.
"Mr. Tambourine Man" lyrics and Bob Dylan in January 1964. . Photo: MARK HUMPHREY/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
To listen to those records is to be reminded that there is a hard, bright intensity to the flame of youthful genius that doesn’t burn much past 30.
A lot of the greatest lyric poetry in English is the work of men and women scarcely out of their teens. Coleridge was 25 when he wrote Kubla Khan; Keats composed his Ode to a Nightingale at 24. And our own James K Baxter one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets, born in Dunedin, started writing poetry at an early age; his first collection of poetry, Beyond the Palisade (1944), was critically acclaimed although he was just 17 years old and a student at the University of Otago. Katherine Mansfield's first formally published story "His Little Friend" appeared in a society magazine, New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal. when barely 12 years old . When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was a prolific writer in the final years of her life. Diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, she died in France aged 34.
Psychologists tell us that “fluid intelligence” — the power of speed, abstraction, and logic — peaks at 20. “Fluid intelligence” will strike most Dylan fans as an apt description of the flashing currents, spiralling eddies and surreal gushes of association that characterise his best songs.
“Fluid intelligence” is also the hydraulic force that drives the great breakthroughs in physics and mathematics. Most of the pre-eminent geniuses of 20th-century physics started young: Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac were 23, 28 and 26 respectively when they made their world-historical achievements in the discipline. “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so,” said Einstein in a phrase that haunts tardy PhD students. He published his own special theory of relativity at 26.
Ernest Rutherford left New Zealand in 1895 as a highly skilled 23-year-old who held three degrees from the University of New Zealand and had a reputation as an outstanding researcher and innovator working at the forefront of electrical technology. He chose to work with Professor J. J. Thomson of the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory.
In 1911 Rutherford deduced from these results that almost all the mass of an atom – an object so small that it would take about a million of them side by side to cross a full stop on this page – is concentrated in a nucleus a thousand times smaller than the atom itself. The nuclear model of the atom had been born. The rest as they say is history, recently ignored it seems, by the American President during his inaugural gush.
This is not to suggest that poetry, algebra, science and song die in middle age (look at the late careers of Thomas Hardy or Leonard Cohen or Rutherford). “Crystallised intelligence” — the accumulation of knowledge, facts and skills — grows throughout life.
Novelists, whose work requires wisdom and stamina, tend to peak later than poets. We have two of those, at least, amongst us, the poet Adams and the author Goodwin. Great visual artists often make their most profound statements deep in old age: Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Goya, me.
But youthful genius has a special, anarchic power that our society is not currently good at harnessing. If the 1960s worshipped youth, the 2020s treats it with smothering condescension. The first decade of adulthood should be one of electric inspiration and liberating learning but it has bafflingly been recast as one of dull professional education, gouging university debt, infantilising internships, dependence on the bank of mum and dad and interweb ruts created by the influencers of social media and a cult of attraction rather than truth exploited by unruly informetric robber barons.
A 21st-century film studio would be more likely to offer the 25-year-old Peter Jackson an unpaid internship than the budget to make the Rings trilogy. The modern Ernest Rutherford might be stuck wasting his time applying for insecure short-term “early career” jobs at universities. And a huge student loan to carry round his neck. And the modern Mr and Mrs Zimmerman would probably be reluctant to allow their penniless teenage son to motorcycle off to Greenwich Village in search of his fortune. Perhaps the modern Dylan, raised indoors on an iPhone, would not want to go, preferring a darkened room of dungeons and dragons.
Watching A Complete Unknown, it struck me that if (as is often remarked) our culture seems tired and repetitive, perhaps it is because it fails to give a proper outlet to the energies of its youngest members. The stupidity, bravery and ambition of the young can be irritating, especially to our cautious, credential-obsessed age, but it is vital to progress. However, even ignorance can be a virtue when it allows you to blunder past the accumulated libraries of accepted wisdom to tackle the fundamental questions for yourself.
Often what the young contribute is energy. Recently, Bill Gates recalled the “insane” schedule of his twenties. Sheer monomania is an important part of what many young start-up founders offer their businesses. As Gates says, such commitment becomes less viable as you grow older, acquire a family and begin to reflect that you do not want to lie on your deathbed looking back on a life of uninterrupted coding. Not everyone has Gates-level energy, but it is strange that our society channels so much youthful drive and passion towards trivial tasks such as fetching coffee, pouting and posing and fingering an iPhone when we should be harnessing that youthful power.
Sociologists sometimes speak of “demographic metabolism” — the process by which societies process generational change. Our demographic metabolism is sluggish and unimaginative at present. We are richer than ever in the wisdom and skill of the old; look around you they are everywhere, artists and rock stars, the cast of Shortland Street, Mitre 10 isle allies, politicians and it seems presidents reliably have careers into their eighties. But if the 2020s can’t match the excitement and innovation of the 1960s it is perhaps because we are bad at taking advantage of the energy of the very young.
When Bob Dylan was finishing up his album called Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964 he wrote a song called My Back Pages in which he laments his optimism and idealism in his earlier work. He talks about how his songs had called people to “rip down all hate” and that he had a “self-proclaimed professor’s tongue”. In the refrain after each set of verses Dylan proclaims, “Aaah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”. It seems like he was already grasping at what he eventually was able to admit more than 40 years later; namely that, in some ways, his younger self was more capable. More capable of writing poetry, more capable of being righteously indignant, more capable of calling out injustice and more capable of waking up his audience to protest the inequality of life.
Dylan would obviously go on to have one of the most successful, and unpredictable, careers in rock history. As he “grew younger” he was not any less talented, but his penchant for writing “protest music” certainly decreased. And the thing is I think we would all agree that we needed the early Dylan and still need the early Dylan. We need the Dylan that calls out hypocrisy and aggressively, yet beautifully, exposes inequality. We need the younger Dylan who was somehow “older” when he announced that the “times are a changin”.
And we need the “older” voices of our young people. We need their propensity to poke at our democracy and point at the powerful and imagine a better future. They’re already attempting to speak to us. Do we have the courage to listen?
Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The young engage fantastic thinking. The young do not ask if the fantastic vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the fantastic vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation.
The powerful make it possible to implement anything and everything. However, the same powerful people are the ones that shrink from imagination because to them, imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the young artist, writer, singer, protestor and scientist. It is the vocation of the young to keep imagination alive, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single ones the powerful urge as the only thinkable answer.
That is the hope of this Trumpian Age.
Adapted after James Marriott Monday January 27 2025, 9.00pm GMT, The Times