Forever Young
Here’s commenter Bryan Lovely, speaking about the 1973 Bob Dylan song [see *NOTE below] :
“Forever Young” sure has a different meaning in my fifties than when I was nineteen. Still love that song.
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young…
That’s one of the great things about any sort of art – popular or classical, highbrow or low. We can keep revisiting it and find something fresh every time. They say you never step into the same river twice, and that’s true of all artistic experiences. It’s also true of performers, who bring something different to the very same song as they age.
The son for whom Dylan wrote the song was born in 1966, which would make him around 54 years old now. Not forever young, I guess, because that’s not possible, as we all know. And yet the wish is there.
The following poem on a similar theme gives me the chills every time I read it. And by “chills” I don’t mean chills of fear or revulsion. I mean a mixture of feelings that includes enormous admiration for the craft involved, delight at the unusual images, appreciation for the poet’s economy of words, awe at the depth of his love that is imagined beyond the grave – and a sense of dread at the meaning of that final couplet.
Roethke died not long after he wrote the poem.
Ted Roethke’s “Wish For a Young Wife“:
My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy’s mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.
*NOTE: Apparently I missed that Bryan Lovely was referring not to the Dylan song but to Alphaville’s song of the same name, “Forever Young.” The discussion works for either, I guess.
There’s also this one:
“May you always do for others
And let others do for you”
Forever young isn’t possible, and I don’t think I want to live forever, at least not in this current body. From watching others, not too much older than I am, I think that accepting help is one of the hardest things to do.
neo: Given that Brian Lovely was addressing me in response to my mention of Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” my guess is he was talking about Alphaville’s song, not Bob Dylan’s, though the latter effort from the Bard of Hibbing is indeed worthy of discussion.
The Alphaville song gives me the shivers for the time it represented and the deep human yearning for life eternal and the terrifying possibility death may be quite near at hand.
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Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, and ever
–Alphaville, “Forever Young”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1TcDHrkQYg
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The video is an iconic 80s big-hair sci-fi flick with about as much fun and awe as could be packed into 3 1/2 minutes of MTV.
But hey, Bob and Ted’s excellent adventures are entirely cool too! Carry on.
huxley:
Ooops! I didn’t see the context and I made the wrong connection. I’ll fix it.
huxley,
Bill and Ted. Bill and Ted.
And Rod Stewart had a hit called ‘Forever Young’ that according to wikipedia he sent to Dylan to ask if it was too close to his version and they agreed to share credit.
I remember the Alphaville version but it is the Rod Stewart ‘Forever Young’ that I remember the most.
Shows the universality of the them that there are three (or at least two and a half) songs with the same name.
Griffin: Art is not math. It got you there and it gave the words, um, topical resonance.
huxley,
And ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ was not art.
We don’t want to live forever.
We just don’t want to die until WE are ready to do so…
😉
Griffin: Yeah, Stewart’s version is the one that pops into my head. I don’t think I even knew Dylan wrote one…. I’ve probably heard Alphaville’s version but cannot recall it.
}}} And ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ was not art.
B&TEA was a MASTERPIECE of comic art. 😉
Yesterday evening the YouTube Algorithm planted a suggestion. Over the past few weeks it’s thrown up a few clips from Barry Lyndon which I’ve clicked on for old times’ sakes — probably because Google knows I have a thing for Prussian marches (no, no, not the Badenweiler :P) and the kind of bonkers optics Kubrick used to film the candlelit scenes in that movie. But who knows? The Ways of the Algo are Inscrutable.
So yesterday, up pops Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1967 War and Peace. Not clips, the whole nine yards. Not pirated. Straight out of Mosfilm’s successor company and in HD. Suffice to say got less sleep than I should have gotten last night.
I haven’t watched all of it yet, Just Part 1 and the beginning of Part 2. Then it was off to download the old reliable Maude translation to my Kindle and get started on that. My old copy from another life and younger me has been in storage in another country for a long time now.
The novel is not the same river now, although cannot remember whether this will be my second or third reading. All the usual observations about returning to a work of art later in life apply.
But the film! I’d never seen it, never had even much awareness that it existed. Silent upon a Peak in Darien and all that. There is something to be said, too, for all too late discoveries.
Griffin: To flail the deceased quadruped… I said,
Bob and Ted’s excellent adventures
which is not the title nor the film with which you are concerned. The first names are different, likewise the concluding cardinality.
What I wrote was an allusive flourish and that is what I call art, however slight of stature.
Zaphod:
I might be about to impress you 🙂 .
I saw that 2-part “War and Peace” not long after it first came out, in an “art” movie theater. Both parts. I can’t remember if it was 2 days in succession, or all at once with a long intermission.
I also remember that they made an error and started by showing us Part 2 first. It took about 10 minutes for them to figure it out and start again with Part 1. But we were very bewildered for those first 10 minutes.
The scene I remember best was the soldiers standing upright on the hill. And Andrei gazing at the sky.
The discussion works for either, I guess.
neo: Not for me. Dylan’s song is a pleasant catalog of blessings from an elder. Alphaville’s, if you take the trip, is a somewhat terrifying encounter with one’s mortality right now plus the desperate yearning one has to be “forever young.”
The 80s context was fear of nuclear war and, I believe, the AIDS pandemic.
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Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?
Let us die young or let us live forever
We don’t have the power, but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music’s for the sad man
Can you imagine when this race is won?
Turn our golden the faces into the sun
Praising our leaders, we’re getting in tune
The music’s played by the madman
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, and ever
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever young
Some are like water, some are like the heat
Some are a melody and some are the beat
Sooner or later they all will be gone
Why don’t they stay young?
It’s so hard to get old without a cause
I don’t want to perish like a fading horse
Youth’s like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever
So many adventures given up today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams swinging out of the blue
Oh let it come true
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever
Forever, and ever?
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever
Forever, and ever?
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever
Forever young
–Alphaville, “Forever Young”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1TcDHrkQYg
Forever young, because they did not live forever.
“They Shall Not Grow Old”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/
A documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of the end of the war.
I think we discussed this last year sometime.
We went to see it and are very glad we made it before the theaters all closed. Melancholy and yet not depressing.
A couple years ago I checked out a DVD of “War and Peace” from the library — not sure which one — then discovered it was in Russian without subtitles. I figured my 50 years-stale college Russian wasn’t anywhere up to the task and returned it.
When I read Tolstoy, I found the Rosemary Edmonds’ translations for Penguin turned the trick. I couldn’t get anywhere with the standard, old,Constance Garnett versions. Turns out Garnett worked fast and furiously, more for quantity — 70 Russian volumes — than quality. Nabokov despised her translations.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars
There are newer translations, which some say are better. Maybe, someday.
Back in the 80s I read up on the Life Extension movement, in which some maverick scientists were serious about extending human life and bringing tips to the masses. Particularly Durk Pearce and Sandy Shaw, in their book, “Life Extension.” They were pretty radical in their recommendations.
Durk and Sandy now have a profitable business selling supplements. But I haven’t seen current photos of them in decades. There were rumors their self-experimentation hadn’t worked out and turned them orange or something.
Be that as it may. One of their clients in the 1980s, referred to as Mr. S, was none other than Clint Eastwood. Clint is 90, looking pretty decent for his age, and still turning out quality films. I wonder if he wasn’t doing something right back then.
Anyway. Back in my Durk and Sandy days I would ask people if they would like to live much longer. To my surprise many said no, and not even if they could keep their health. They just didn’t want to stay alive much past their three-score-and-ten.
To me this was hard to understand and still is. God, how I would love to have a few more decades, much less a few more centuries, to learn languages, musical instruments, how to paint, and create, plus a lot of STEM stuff. Not to mention just enjoy it all.
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Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.
–“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbR7axof1wk
Neo,
Yep, I was talking about the Alphaville song from 1985.
Which, not coincidentally, was the year I turned down my parents’ offer of a semester in Europe, because that was when the Soviets were getting so psychotic I was worried they would start World War 3 while I was over there.
Exactly. Shivers. And tears.
huxley —
Old Jay Leno joke:
“Doctors say new treatments can give people more years in their 80s. That’s no good. What people want is more years in their 20s!“
Which, not coincidentally, was the year I turned down my parents’ offer of a semester in Europe, because that was when the Soviets were getting so psychotic I was worried they would start World War 3 while I was over there.
Brian Lovely: I remember that time. The fear of WW III was what drove me back into the left. I watched the demonstrations in Europe on TV and saw the tensions between US and USSR escalating, so I joined the Nuclear Freeze and became an activist.
I attended a big march in San Francisco and a wiry, young Asian woman from the Revolutionary Communist Party was running up and down the column of protesters, screaming at us, “You think your leaders are going to save you? They aren’t. You’re like those people in ‘They Day After’!” referring to that TV movie about nuclear war which had aired in November, 1983.
“The Day After” had huge ratings. A lot of people were worried back then. I wonder how many remember today.
I remember very well. I had recurring dreams about imminent holocaust, scrambling to pack up useful things and trying to think of someone to run to. Finally it became clear to me it was just a way of processing the fear of the collapse of my emotional world, a hangover from a catastrophic early loss, and they stopped.
I was stunned when the USSR collapsed. It made me begin to rethink Reagan.
Growing up in Anchorage, with a USAF base, an Army base, a major airport, and a rail/port connection, I knew we were going to get three warheads at least. I remember looking out the living room window as a 13-year-old in 1978 wondering if I would be able to see the missiles coming in, or if the explosions would be a surprise.
One of my best friends was the son of Latvian refugees. I wept when the wall came down, and again when the Baltic states were freed from the USSR. The thought of giving in to the Soviets never crossed my mind.