utside Goldwin-Smith Hall, under its stone portico and behind a row of Greco-Roman columns, a curly-headed boy in a dull blue suit leans backwards against the exterior wall. He hums into a harmonica racked to his body, resting so closely under his chin that every averted glance downwards puffs a small breath into the instrument. Deep-black shades hide his stoic face, and he is smoking gently, inhaling small, invisible puffs and easing out ribbons of musty, white-grey smoke. He says his name is Dash. 

It’s cold and misty outside, and plops of icy rain splatter onto the stone pathways of the quadrangle which the building sits over. By this time in the winter, the grass is dying. It’s far from the earlier, warm autumn weather in which a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest took place in New York’s Washington Square Park.

Another boy (who bears no resemblance to famed folk singer Bob Dylan) giggles beneath the stone ceiling. I ask him about the day’s competition and he snickers about another look-alike contest that was held days earlier in the crisp NYC air, again at Washington Square Park, for the murderer of a United Healthcare CEO. He jokes that he’d be in favor of a reenactment of the shooting.

Another boy, with short brown curls and few words to offer, is hanging about the columns. He’s dressed in straight blue jeans and a brown Patagonia puffer that looks both old and new. The rain is blowing in the wind. The frigid air is filled with a cacophony of sniffles. Still, he steps out from the portico, pitter-patter landing on his head and jacket—no words, just a distant look in his sagging eyes. He later tells me his name is Jamie.

A few more Caucasian, curly-headed brunettes join Dash and soft-spoken Jamie under the portico. The contest was supposed to start a half-hour ago; the judges—from an obscure campus radio club—have yet to arrive. 

A round-faced boy named Billy has a film camera strapped around his neck and fiddles with a cigarette. He looks like a smaller Timothée Chalamet. I wonder why he and the others have decided to dress up as Dylan—most of them haven’t even heard of A Complete Unknown, the biopic starring Chalemet that premiers just weeks after the contest. He says the “thought leaders” of the past were “pushing the boundaries of their respective art forms and contributing to greater thought in society. You know,” he adds, “I think we need a little bit more of that.”

His friend Max chimes in: “I think Dylan and that 60s movement, that, like, coffeehouse, like you know, sort of quiet rebellion… I think he represents both the hope of that time in America, you know, and I think the last gasp—like the highest point of this sort of intellectual counterculture that I feel, like, is so moribund both in America and then at Cornell.”

It seems like all the Dylans here, in their blue jeans and dusty leather shoes, are grasping for something like that—or, at least, are pretending to. 

“Yeah,” says Bobby to Max.

“Like, I feel like this university has become pretty vocationalized. Like there's such an emphasis and dominance on the STEM stuff and the engineering and the pre-med and the pre-law. I think there's been a loss of culture and I don't think it's a coincidence that the Bob Dylan's that we see dressed like Bob Dylan here today are the Bob Dylan of the 60s.” 

He means the coffeehouse quiet rebellion and not the hacky gospel of Dylan’s later career—because everything, even the best of the past, degrades over time.
As Chalamet appeared on a podcast promoting his movie, he sighed, “when somebody gets revered like Bob—at some point he becomes this legend—you know, people can sanitize the past.” 

Max continues on about the spirit of counterculture that lofted from seedy places: the feeling that young people had that they could really change things, or at least wanted to change things, or even just wanted to talk about them. Back then, people smoked, they read, and they listened to the radio. “I think people, especially here, miss an element of that. I think the loss of that element has harmed American culture.”

Billy, fingering an unlit cigarette, joins in: “There is a big emphasis on STEM stuff at the school. You know, great programs, don't get me wrong. But you know, I think there's a certain sense of culture and revitalization that I want. Both for our country, but also I think small scale, Cornell, you know.”

In Dylan’s day, or so goes our collective collegiate memory, college wasn’t only about the internships you’d get during school and the salary you’d make after it; liberal arts meant something meaningful, profoundly human. Student protestors could actually send shockwaves across the country, shaping an American culture that the boys (and I) somehow have nostalgia for.

There’s a word for this feeling of nostalgia: longing for a period in the past which we’ve never experienced, brought about by a dissatisfaction with the present, an a-historical dysphoria. The feeling can cause us to look with rose-colored glasses on an imperfect past, to forgo the present moment because we view what came before us as better than what will come of us. Coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the affliction is called “anemoia.”

“There's no way you're going to smoke a cigarette, Billy. It's not right.”

“I'm gonna light it and then it's gonna go out, and then it's going to look like it's already been…” 

Billy leans against a column and poses for pictures. For a moment he’s abandoning Dylan and the past, going for something more modern, full Chalamet. 

None of the other boys bear an exact resemblance to that long-faced, slim-nosed folk, rock, and gospel singer either, but they’re also not far off. Much more than their looks, I tell the group, it’s their personalities that are akin to Bob Dylan. 

Max, responding immediately: “I don't feel like my personality.”

Dash, now engaged in the conversation: “I don't think I have a personality.” And lugubriously, after I ask him to elaborate: “You know… people go around and say things and do things and act certain ways, but… you know… some of us are just here.” The final words fade into silence. I truly can’t tell if he’s doing a bit. 

Bobby, musingly: “I think my art is more me than my personality.”

Then Max asks if anyone has ever read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. “There's a character,” he says, “who's very, like, sort of impassive—doesn't really speak a lot. He’s enigmatic.” 

Max ruminates. “I mean, you can never really tell if that black expanse is like a deep sea with untold depths…”—I glance at Dash who’s engulfed in his shades and suit and cigarette smoke—“or is he just inert?”

Minutes pass and the contemplation continues, rain falling. The quiet one, Jamie, is back under the portico, listening to the other look-alikes. 

I catch the middle of a conversation: “In a way, both South Park and the Grateful Dead class has given me a new outlook on life. And I mean that, I mean that literally. It's just—”

And Dash is playing a tune on the harmonica, and it sounds sorrowful.

The look-alikes file into Goldwin-Smith Hall, where it’s warm and about two-hundred students are gathered in the atrium that their Cornell Radio hosts have commandeered. The Dylans form a semi-circle and, one by one, present their acts for the competition. One sings a verse from “Shelter from the Storm,” another “Blowing in the Wind.” 

Dash, to hefty applause, steps forward and quiets the crowd. “Everybody asks me about meanings or something behind my songs… Uh, there's not really any meaning at all. I'm not a singer or songwriter, really, or anything. I'm, you know, I'm just a song and dance man.” And then he plays his harmonica.

Billy steps up and tells the crowd he came to the look-alike competition as Timothée Chalamet. Then he sings Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” Max, whose friend refused to dress up as Dylan’s girlfriend Suze on the album cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, has little to add. 

The onlookers vote by cheering, and an honorable mention goes to the denim-jacketed Dylan who sang that he “came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.” He wins a loose apple. Third place goes to a scarf-wearing, newsboy-capped Bob Dylan, who wins a five-dollar gift card to Dunkin Donuts. Billy wins second place as Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, and he receives a book with a gracious laugh: Communism, A Very Short Introduction. And lastly, Dash is crowned the first-place look-alike. For his performance, he accepts an almost-full pack of American Spirits and two crinkled dollars.

When the contest ends, the look-alikes mingle in the atrium and a tinge of cigarette smoke drifts ever upward. As I wince slightly at the smell of the smoke, Max greets me with a smile. “I was wrong,” he concedes, “American counter-intellectualism is alive and well.”

In A Complete Unknown, in an albeit fictional first meeting of Bob Dylan and his idol, Woody Guthrie, Dylan sings, “‘Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along / Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn / It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born.” For a moment during the look-alike contest, it did feel like we somewhat recognized—selectively and, yes, very naively—what we were missing in our present moment. Beyond just thrift shops and retrograde style cycles, the new world could be old again; our anemoia could be performatively exercised; the times could still be a-changin.’ 

A student joins Max and me, and asks what’s going on. I tell her I’m covering a Bob Dylan look-alike competition. 

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She’s stumped. “Who’s Bob Dylan?”

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Then Max leans in. “It’s dead.”