What we have been graced with to help flesh out those quick lines are songs, deep, rich songwriting that adds not just color, but contour, shading and perspective. It's the words that resonate into the far corners of the culture or sink into the everyday routines of life. His contribution is mighty. Possibly times are better now, but I think we have more hope because of the '60s and Bob Dylan. And it doesn't hurt to look back and into his words.
Experience finds itself bathed in dissonance and there are no rules or neat packages.
It's an odd blend of altruism and narcissism that is brilliant. Dylan has influenced a couple of generations of rockers, punkers and rappers with stylistic twists and turns that have taken him from voice and acoustic instrumentation, to plugged in and ragged, then bent through the prism of God, and more recently, vulnerable and stripped down once again. He sopped up a lot of different influences and shared them. That constant seeking, and consequential reinvention, throughout a career that has alternately been full of copious work and pregnant pauses, has allowed for an iconoclastic profile. His impulse was to keep turning ever inward.