Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column “Things Worth Remembering,” in which he presents great speeches from famous orators we should commit to heart. Scroll down to listen to Douglas reflect on Bob Dylan’s 2017 Nobel Lecture.
A Nobel Prize is not an honor bestowed for free. Whenever the Nobel Committees make their annual round of phone calls—as they did this week—there will be those who pick up the phone without realizing that, to confirm their status as a laureate, they will have to deliver a public lecture in their chosen field, or forfeit the $900,000 prize.
Perhaps we ought to pity the recipients who, having been rewarded for benefiting humankind, aren’t well-equipped to communicate their thoughts to the rest of their species. The peace laureate is usually inspiring, of course, but the scientists are often hit-and-miss. (To illustrate this point, allow me to present the title of the lecture delivered by one of last year’s Nobel laureates in chemistry: “Spatial confinement of electronic & vibronic excitations in QDs.”) But when Alfred Nobel explained his idea for the awards in his last will and testament, read in 1895, he started by honoring a particular art form: literature. The wordsmiths, surely, are best placed to excel at the assignment?
Alas, writers often are not speakers. Last year’s literature laureate, the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, spoke about how his life as a writer was born from his own fear of speaking aloud—a fear that is noticeable in the recording of the speech. The year before, the French memoirist Annie Ernaux kept her eyes glued to the page as she gave a passable speech about finding the right words. Yet one literature laureate sticks in the mind—and not only because his award was rather controversial at the time.
On this very day, eight years ago, Bob Dylan got a phone call that left him “speechless.”