On the Road
I write this from the Oakland airport, where I am finishing the first of two weeks on the West Coast. My wife and I, who met in college and after our families had left the places we grew up, are going to introduce one another to our hometowns. It will be a pleasure, and a needed break. I intend to continue writing when we return, the week of the 26th, though who knows I may be unable to help myself.
Before I go, I thought I would share a book that has been far better, and far more influential, than I expected: Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
If you aren't familiar, there isn't much of a plot. A cast of rotating characters, mostly thinly veiled caricatures of Beat movement figures like Neal Cassady, Alan Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, and Kerouac himself, zoom across the country bothering people and looking for It - Neal's word for a thing defined almost entirely without words. But from his firm conclusions about what has It and what doesn't, It is clearly a vital stew of adventure, excitement, authenticity, novelty, beer, meaning, and thrilling danger, hiding somewhere in the oyster world.
I started the book almost grudgingly, having reserved it from the library for reasons I can't recall, and accepting the loan only because I didn't have anything else to read. But I was gripped almost immediately by the prose - a weakness of mine - and an endless stream of sentences that one after the other, I had never seen nor imagined. The news, for years now, has delivered literal and even historical novelty - and yet it feels the same to read every time. Kerouac feels very different. And I found that this was unexpectedly moving.
To buy, not reluctantly, into the myth it presented, I believe that what really excited me was It. The certainty in its existence, and goodness - the relentless energy to chase it down. In Sinners I saw parables of nihilism, and in its extraordinary financial success I see a national intimacy with stories of despair. But in On the Road I saw above all, hope. It was a chaotic and reckless and often self centered hope, but it was unambiguous. We'll go to New York! It'll be great! Then we'll go to California! That'll be great too! And then we'll go back, hoo-whee!
I cannot begin to remember a similar enthusiasm in any of the other media I consume these days, fiction or non. And I found that I had needed it very badly.
The other feature that struck me was the deep, defining, and gently rendered lunacy of every one of the characters. It reminded me of the crazy people I had grown up with, and on, and had loved, and how as I became more and more respectable, they became fewer and fewer. And how I missed them.
As the plane taxis out, I will close with this. With all the work ahead of us, my jaw is too set to feel much in the exhortations to Joy that I see so frequently, sprinkled across the internet. But there was something in the gleaming eyes of Kerouac and his friends that pushed oxygen to a smouldering energy in me. Perhaps it could do the same for you.
