Disciples will ruminate over lines like "When you think you've lost everything, you find you can lose a little more," "It's not dark yet but it's getting there" and "I was on anything but a roll." 

At 56, nearly four decades after his first public appearances, Dylan is on a roll. A chorus of praise greets Time Out of Mind: A+ in Entertainment Weekly, **** in Rolling Stone, "his best sustained work since the mid-1970s," raves The New York Times. He's Newsweek's cover boy. On Saturday, he played for the pope. In December, he'll become the first rock star anointed a Kennedy Center honoree. 

Dylan, slim and natty in a black shirt, slacks and patent leather loafers, seems anything but morose during a rare interview. His clear blue eyes, ready smile and animated demeanor suggest good health and high spirits. He is quick to discourage analysts who'd dismantle his songs for clues about death and despair. 

"I don't think they should or could be interpreted that way, if at all," he says, his back to a hotel window that frames the Pacific sunset. "You can't interpret a Hank Williams song. He's done the interpretation and the performance, and that's it. Now it's for the listener to decide if it moves him or not. That's something you don't even decide. That happens to you unconsciously. 

"I let the songs fly, and people respond. Whether they make a valid interpretation or look at it with a false eye, I'm not concerned with that." 

Nor is the ferociously private Dylan willing to expound on Time's tales of shattered romance, except to acknowledge that the songs are drawn from personal experience. 

"I can identify with other people and situations, but I tend not to," he says. "I would rather recall things from my own life, and I don't have to force myself. . . . Just being in certain environments triggers a response in my brain, a certain feeling I want to articulate. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction. I know that personal sacrifice has a great deal to do with how we live or don't live our lives. 

"These songs are not allegorical," Dylan stresses. "I have given that up. . . . Philosophical dogma doesn't interest me." 

Pop's most scrutinized yet inscrutable artist doesn't deny his mercurial nature or his disdain for the labels of rebel, poet and prophet. Though he radically transformed folk, rock and the singer/songwriter genre in the '60s, he refuses to clone seminal works and adopts a humble stance. 

"I don't consider myself a songwriter in the sense of Townes Van Zandt or Randy Newman," he says. "I'm not Paul Simon. I can't do that. My songs come out of folk music and early rock 'n' roll, and that's it. I'm not a classical lyricist, I'm not a meticulous lyricist. I don't write melodies that are clever or catchy. It's all very traditionally documented." 

The most influential songwriter of modern times recognizes that his mass appeal has waned. 

"I'm under the impression that people aren't really paying attention to my records," he says. "I'm aware that I don't sell records like I did in the '80s or the '70s, and that's OK as long as I can play, and the right crowd is going to come and see it properly. I don't follow what records are at the top of the charts. I ceased doing that a long, long time ago." 

He does, however, take notice of rising son Jakob, whose band the Wallflowers, No. 31 after 64 weeks on Billboard's chart, commercially outranks his dad's '90s output. 

"I'm proud of his accomplishments," Dylan says. "He's still young, and he's come a long way in a short time. I worried about him when he started out. I just didn't want to see him get roughed up. This business can throw you into deep water." 

The murkiest depths? Celebrity. "It mortifies me to even think that I am a celebrity," Dylan says. "I'm not one, and I never want to be one. I lead a very insular existence. It's different on stage, because those people look at me as a performer. 

"By being a celebrity, you lose your anonymity. It short-circuits your creative powers when people come up and interrupt your train of thought. They consider you completely approachable. And you can't be rude to people, so basically you shut yourself down. I know I do. I shut myself down when people come up and want to shake my hand or want to talk. That's just dead time." 

Dylan avoids the press, loathes photo sessions and steadily releases records with scant promotion. 

Time contains his first batch of originals since 1990's Under the Red Sky. Since then, he has released a boxed set of rarities, his third greatest hits album, an MTV Unplugged, and two collections of vintage folk and blues, 1992's Good as I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong. 

Making Time was a liberating experience for Dylan, who can feel burdened by the weight of his legend. The classics he performs on stage "are proven to be true and strong, otherwise I couldn't sing them night after night," he says. "It's not like I can eclipse that. 

"I'm not looking to do that, but to record new songs, they have to be in that arena, and that's why it took a long time. I was constantly thinking, will these songs stand up to what I'm playing night after night?" 

Dylan considers his early records roughly sketched prototypes that later matured onstage. Produced by Daniel Lanois last January in a Miami studio, the new songs were captured live with sidemen schooled in low-tech production. 

"This record is not a blueprint," Dylan says. "This is it. This is the way these songs should go, every single last one. This record went through evolutions. What you hear comes through that whole maze, that labyrinth of fire that it takes to perfect the arrangement and structure. 

"There is nothing contemporary about it. There is no trickery. We went back to the way a primitive record was made, before the advent of technology. It's almost a revolutionary concept these days." 

The man who shocked the folk rank and file by plugging in now worries that high-watt noise is eradicating traditional American music. 

"You see all this electricity speaking, all this wizardry," he says. "Pull out the plugs and probably very few of these people could move you, because they can't play. They are dominated by the electricity. Guys like Elmore James played acoustically and used electricity so they could be heard in a crowded room. They weren't depending on electricity to hide talent they didn't have. I don't want a bunch of flaky sounds. It's a dead end." 

Dylan was still sequencing Time tracks when he was stricken with chest pains in May. He was declared fit after an initial medical exam. 

"I accepted that, but the pain didn't go away," he says. "It was intolerable pain, where it affects your breathing every waking moment." 

He entered a hospital May 25 and was diagnosed with pericarditis, a swelling of the sac around the heart, brought on by a fungal infection called histoplasmosis. Dylan spent six weeks off his feet. His brush with death brought delirium and ennui but no spiritual revelations. 

"I didn't have any philosophical, profound thoughts," he says. "The pain stopped me in my tracks and fried my mind. I was so sick my mind just blanked out. I'm getting better; that's all I can say right now." 

The alignment of events this year - his health scare, broad acclaim for Time Out of Mind, the papal encounter - has magnified Dylan's star power and fed an ongoing deification that he finds perplexing. In 1990, he received France's highest cultural honor. The next year, he got Grammy's lifetime achievement award. And in 1992, an all-star concert, pay-per-view and compilation album toasted his 30th anniversary as a recording artist. 

Such honors "are unexpected and unsolicited, and I'm not nonchalant about it, because in some sense it really does matter," he says. "I'm very appreciative." 

But he's leery of the hype. Dozens of books are devoted to the enigmatic troubadour. He doesn't read them. 

"I'm not going to read a book about myself," he says with a chuckle. "I mean, why? I'm with myself enough. I wake up every day and I'm still me. It would be torture to read about myself. I would rather read about anybody else but me."