Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke. There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies. The stuff that could make you bugged-eyed. Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus' lectures and letters to Brutus. Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General—a narrative which would give you chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of any eye. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine.
There were novels by Gogol and Balzac, Maupassant, Hugo and Dickens. I usually opened up some book to the middle, read a few pages and if I liked it went back to the beginning. Materia Medica (the causes and cures for diseases)—that was a good one. I was looking for the part of my education that I never got. Sometimes I'd open up a book and see a handwitten note scribbled in the front, like in Machiavelli's The Prince, there was written, "The spirit of the hustler". "The cosmopolitan man" was written on the title page in Dante's Inferno. The books weren't arranged in an particular order or subject matter. Rousseau's Social Contract was next to Temptation of St. Anthony, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the scary horror tale, was next to the autobiography of Davy Crockett. Endless rows of books—Sophocles' book on the nature and function of the gods—why there are only two sexes. Alexander the Great's march into Persia. When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that, he never had any trouble with the population, no uprisings or anything. Alexander knew how to get absolute control. There was Simon Bolivar's biography, too. I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that. I read some of The Sound and the Fury, didn't quite get it, but Faulkner was powerful. I read some of the Albertus Magnus book...the guy who mixed up scientific theories with theology. It was lightweight compared to Thucydides. Magnus seemed like a guy who couldn't sleep, writing this stuff late at night, clothes stuck to his clammy body. A lot of these books were too big to read, like giant shoes fitted for large-footed people. I read the poetry books, mostly. Byron and Shelley and Longfellow and Poe. I memorized Poe's poem "The Bells" and strummed it to a melody on my guitar. There was a book there on Joseph Smith, the authentic American prophet who identifies himself with Enoch in the Bible and says that Adam was the first man-god. This stuff pales in comparison to Thucydides, too. The books make the room vibrate in a nauseating and forceful way. The words of "La Vita Solitaria" by Leopardi seemed to come out of the trunk of a tree, hopeless, uncrushable sentiments.
—Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), pp. 36-37.
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