Read Write

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Entry #1

So far, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road reminds me of Bob Dylan’s Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, a spoken word he wrote when Guthrie was in his last hours. The best writing I have ever read/heard. I will post that at another time and comment solely on that, but for now I won’t take the easy road and use somebody else’s words to explain myself. But if you’ve read On the Road, check out Last Thoughts and you’ll see a comparison – a comparison I’ll begin to touch on here.

In On the Road, Jack is renamed Sal, and well, he’s on the road. If somebody’s on the road they must be searching for something and I think that alone is why this book resonates with so many from the Beat Generation and beyond. We are all searching for something and that is what links Kerouac’s writing and Dylan’s songs – it is what links us all and is the reason certain songs or books hit us all – they create a universal feeling. It is the reason I moved to New York, or why Jack’s character, Sal, traveled West and back, and then West again. It’s the reason people become writers, musicians, or even doctors or politicians. Yeah, the doctors and politicians want to make change for society as a whole, help people, and so do writers and musicians – but let’s cut the crap – all of them and all of us are really just searching for something within ourselves. Some may read a book and then write about it like I’m doing now. Others may travel to Europe, others find (or first look) for God. G.0.D.’s not behind that bush? Let’s look behind the next. Some lift weights, others take drugs, others join a yoga class…others and so on. That’s my reaction to Part One of On the Road…let’s keep searching…

Entry #2

I’m not so sure I gained much from the second part – except that it makes me want to go out and live. And it made me realize I’m jealous of people like Jack’s character, Sal, that just get up and go – live in the moment. How much time do we spend sitting in jealousy? There are some quotes from this section that will be useful later and I will comment on them later – but for now I want to get back to reading…

Idea of wasting time like with this book – what did I really gain? – but don’t just sit there!

Maybe at first On the Road didn’t appeal to me (like all of life doesn’t) because it is real life – but like real life, when in the moment you don’t love every moment, but the day comes to look back and you’re glad you lived it. And it’s inevitable the reader closes the book and dreams about their own road to travel…

Entry #3

Part three was just more of Sal and Dean’s adventures, one’s that in the reader’s mind just collage together and are forgotten as we read and dream about living our own adventures – jealous.

During the reading, I occasionally paused to write something in the back flap of the book. You can say that Kerouac’s writing inspired these, I don’t know. It’s more like they just came to mind:

…he talked about books like some talk about wine and I just ain’t got the time…

…I wanna laugh without the repercussions
Play like there is no time
And of course, we can’t suspend time
But we did back then
And the only thing keeping me going
Is the hope we will again…

…And in the end
I think all we really learn and know
Is that time passes
And we need to keep our feet on the gasses…

Entry #4

No real reaction to Part Four, just anticipation of the book ending – a similar feel to when you know something good is about to end – a nausea is created – it could be the end of something that seems so simple like the end of a long night of drinks and conversation with friends, or something that seems so much more important like the end of a relationship. Both are important though and it seems Jack’s character, Sal, is coming to this realization. Dean’s traveling back to New York to a new wife, kid, a new life. Basically, Sal’s drinking buddy is moving on – they will continue a relationship, but the relationship will never be the same. I feel like that’s going on in my life in a couple different ways.

Entry #5

Ends like a long, long, long letter to a long-gone lost old friend…


(Something I wrote in between pages…what the hell has life come to)…

Silence,
There is no such thing
The quieter you try to be
The louder your surroundings get
The fridge,
Humming like it’s constantly burping
And laughing at your stagnation
The toilet,
With its stubbornness to never flush correctly
Is whaling its sound
Like a more peacefully drawn out scratching of the blackboard
Which in my prose poses the question -
What’s more torturous?
The immediate turmoil
Or years and years of nagging erosion to the shoreline of your soul…

(I know exactly what this means…if you don’t then you obviously don’t get Kerouac…because I obviously do)…


…Below are quotes from each section of On the Road that when reading I thought they’d be useful so I dog-eared the pages…some I’ll comment on, others save for a rainy day…

Part 1

In the bar I told dean, “Hell, man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict” (Kerouac 3).

“We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad” (Kerouac 58).

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk – real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further” (Kerouac 58).

“This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night?” (Kerouac 68).

- Like Cat Power said, “We’re all just living people…just doing one thing in order to do the next.”

“Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life…Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But the madman drove me home to New York” (Kerouac 106).

“Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too” (Kerouac 107).

- The blessing in disguise way of thinking, maybe?…I may agree at some points, but tell this to my friend that just learned he may lose his leg for life…could it be?...

Part 2

“I want to marry a girl so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time – all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something” (Kerouac 117).

“What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just go along. I dig life.” He repeated it, following Dean’s line. He had no direction (Kerouac 123).

- I recently wrote -- I reluctantly tell people I want to be a writer. They ask, “What do you want to write?” I very confidently have no defined answer.
- So for now, this is what I’m doing.

“The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kind, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death (Kerouac 124).

“This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion” (Kerouac 126).

- I shouldn’t have to quote Kerouac on this one…I should quote everybody…

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies” (Kerouac 157).

“Ah, but we know time. Everything takes care of itself” (Kerouac 158).

Part 3

“They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness” (Kerouac 210).

(Something I wrote that I think relates)...

All I want is the unknown
It will reveal itself in due time
I can’t wait
But apparently I can
Because I have to
And that is how we all grew
It all traces back to that music
And its continuous footprints
That have been followed
And will be followed by generations to come
And so
The street performers will continue to play the walking tune
As passerbys hum yet run to wherever they’d get to anyways if they’d walked
And this is what I’m presently learning
And this is what I’m presently learning…
But not living…

(Kerouac’s above quote is about universal feelings…and I think I create one as well with whatever the hell I wrote above too)…

“Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do” (Kerouac 244).

Part 4

“What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow” (Kerouac 251).

“The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down” (Kerouac 253).

“Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road…I had an awful long way to go too” (Kerouac 253-54).

-And this was my perception of my parents…well, until…

“…The endless poem…” (Kerouac 255).

Part 5

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old” (Kerouac 307).


And in closing…I don’t want to brag…but I think I conveyed what Kerouac tried to convey in a whole book in about a page…

“The Book of Just the In-Between Lines”…

For if I could just find a simple tune
Maybe I’ll find that direction home soon
Maybe if I keep strummin’
Maybe I’ll find somethin’
For I’m not the white Bill Cosby
But I do wanna be somebody
Maybe if I keep strummin’
Maybe I’ll find myself on the “Road to Rocknroll”
Like Joe Strummer
Not likely
But a young mind can wonder
And so I wonder
And so I wonder
And so I wonder
Inhaling this world we live in – through observation
Exhaling through poetry
It has nothing to do with you getting to know or notice me
Because I’ve known myself for 20 plus years now
And just noticed my complexity
Oh geez
Maybe one day I’ll be sober with my insanity
All bound to go crazy
Searchin’ for our great discovery
Like John Nash
Oh where oh where can such be found in this Hocus Pocus land?
If Scorsese can’t show you through a lens
If the latest best-selling John Grisham book can’t show you through his pen
Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places
Ask a friend
It doesn’t matter how many listens
Hendrix can’t bend the rhythm of what you’re livin’
Check the Highlights
Maybe it’s hidden
Because I’ve looked in the books
The lines
All and in-between
But I can’t seem to find what I’m lookin’ for
But music keeps knockin’
And it’s a-knockin’
And it's a-knockin'
And a-knockin’
And a
I think it’s time to open up this door…