all that road going...all the people dreaming in the immensity of it
oh god.
i just fnished on the road. i don't even know what to do with myself. christ. i can't even articulate what i derived from the book. i suppose that's understandable...it's such an incredibly ambiguous book i can't imagine what critics had to say about it.
but i thought it was amazing. my god. i've never encountered a book that so perfectly harnessed life at its most raw. soooo incredible. so prolific, profound, and honest. it's probably the most honest thing i've ever read. so sad. so very very gravely sad. not a depressive sad, not a whiney sad, just a perfect, beautiful, incredibly truthful sadness. it eminates from the core of the book. from the core of dean. everything about the book was sad...the road, dean, every single character, sal himself, every city, the wilderness, the lifestyle, the music. whether it was a beautiful, pure sadness or a mournful, pitiful sadness, it was all there. life is sad, at its core. life is so many things, but at its purest, it's sad. don't get me wrong...i'm not saying that everything sucks and people should just sit around and cry all day. that's the opposite of what i mean. i just mean that life is so many things, life can be so many things, but the one thing that encompasses and exemplifies is all is the real, pure, raw sadness of it. it's beautiful. no wonder kerouac used the word "sad" to describe everything. it's the perfect word.
the only true, honest thing i know for sure from this book is that it made me incredibly, deeply sad. dean. dean was the book, he was at the heart of everything. he was the god of the beat generation, and on the road was the bible. dean, the homeless kid who was born on the road, the hustler and con man, the nymphomaniac, the drug addict, the drunk, the man who was three times married and twice divorced, the maniac, the idiot, the young, crazy-eyed fiend of the night and the music and the road and women and kicks and life. he was so addicted to life, so completely delirious from the sheer essence of life that grows among the people and the wilderness and the road that can go anywhere, that he left humanity in the dust to pursue his own crazy kicks that fueled his life. he swallowed the earth and it radiated from him in waves like the waves of heat that radiate from the sun. people marveled at him, laughed at him, humored him, condescended him, pitied him, were delighted by him, and loved him...but they didn't--and they couldn't--understand him. no one ever could. he was like a child, amazed by everything, delighted by everyone, and could do nothing but rush around and gaze at everything incredulously, repeating, "yes! yes!" as if people were doing something incredible and profound and wonderful just by existing. and the people, in turn found him first endearing, odd, even wonderful, but they all grew annoyed at his constant incredulity and rushing and high-strung lifestyle and turned their backs on him, the angel. what they failed to understand, what they failed to try to understand that dean had a perfectly sane and ingenious grip on life and what life should be. he was delighted by people and things who were doing nothing but living, existing the best way they knew how. dean saw it, and that it was beautiful and miraculous and incredible and something that should be praised every day, every moment, and he did. he didn't stop for creature comforts, he couldn't stay locked in a house or in a steady paying job. he couldn't live such a common life and know that life was slipping him by. he wanted to cherish every breath he took and make every moment of his time wonderful and exciting, the way it should be. schedules don't matter, houses don't matter, all these trinkets and comforts and material things simply don't matter, whatsoever. life is to be attained in the raw, when material life is absent. enlightenment can only be gained when life is pure. dean pursued life with such a lustful, thirsty passion, he took no care for himself or his personal well-being. all that mattered was the pursuit of life, what others called his kicks. people who wanted nothing more than blind existence with false comforts saw dean's actions as "throwing his life away" (what they really meant was throwing his material, false life away) and caring only for himself and his kicks. they were incredibly wrong on that accusation. dean cared nothing for himself...he forgot everything, even himself, in his crazy pursuit for life. he saw everything and did his best to drink everything in, to dig life at its purest. i'm thinking especially of his trip to mexico and his kicks in san francisco and denver with the poor black jazz community. music, the purest form of expression when played by the soul, spoke to him and understood him and drove him. he idolized those who could make the music scream the blues and the craziness of life. he'd devoted his life to living, something that few know how to do. and at the end of the book, the final image of dean is prophetic. the image of him "ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought especially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone...rounding the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again." shunted, however inadvertently, by his friends, penniless and friendless, unable to speak, a dejected angel of humanity mingling in the sleet and the trash and the cold, the one person to have harnessed life's essence and passion. what an incredibly representative image of where peoples' priorities lie. money over life, always. so incredibly sad.
but this book was amazing. astounding. it blew me away, totally. i wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone and everyone. i want to harness the passion of life. i want to dig the road, drink in life at its purest, and lose myself in the craziness of the world. i don't want to waste away doing what should be done and following the proper procedure. god, i never want to waste away in contentedness. i never want to be comfortably numb. if i'm riddled with pain and sadness my whole life, i'd rather have that then the blind stupor of a structured life. to put it in a cliche, give me liberty or give me death.
i just fnished on the road. i don't even know what to do with myself. christ. i can't even articulate what i derived from the book. i suppose that's understandable...it's such an incredibly ambiguous book i can't imagine what critics had to say about it.
but i thought it was amazing. my god. i've never encountered a book that so perfectly harnessed life at its most raw. soooo incredible. so prolific, profound, and honest. it's probably the most honest thing i've ever read. so sad. so very very gravely sad. not a depressive sad, not a whiney sad, just a perfect, beautiful, incredibly truthful sadness. it eminates from the core of the book. from the core of dean. everything about the book was sad...the road, dean, every single character, sal himself, every city, the wilderness, the lifestyle, the music. whether it was a beautiful, pure sadness or a mournful, pitiful sadness, it was all there. life is sad, at its core. life is so many things, but at its purest, it's sad. don't get me wrong...i'm not saying that everything sucks and people should just sit around and cry all day. that's the opposite of what i mean. i just mean that life is so many things, life can be so many things, but the one thing that encompasses and exemplifies is all is the real, pure, raw sadness of it. it's beautiful. no wonder kerouac used the word "sad" to describe everything. it's the perfect word.
the only true, honest thing i know for sure from this book is that it made me incredibly, deeply sad. dean. dean was the book, he was at the heart of everything. he was the god of the beat generation, and on the road was the bible. dean, the homeless kid who was born on the road, the hustler and con man, the nymphomaniac, the drug addict, the drunk, the man who was three times married and twice divorced, the maniac, the idiot, the young, crazy-eyed fiend of the night and the music and the road and women and kicks and life. he was so addicted to life, so completely delirious from the sheer essence of life that grows among the people and the wilderness and the road that can go anywhere, that he left humanity in the dust to pursue his own crazy kicks that fueled his life. he swallowed the earth and it radiated from him in waves like the waves of heat that radiate from the sun. people marveled at him, laughed at him, humored him, condescended him, pitied him, were delighted by him, and loved him...but they didn't--and they couldn't--understand him. no one ever could. he was like a child, amazed by everything, delighted by everyone, and could do nothing but rush around and gaze at everything incredulously, repeating, "yes! yes!" as if people were doing something incredible and profound and wonderful just by existing. and the people, in turn found him first endearing, odd, even wonderful, but they all grew annoyed at his constant incredulity and rushing and high-strung lifestyle and turned their backs on him, the angel. what they failed to understand, what they failed to try to understand that dean had a perfectly sane and ingenious grip on life and what life should be. he was delighted by people and things who were doing nothing but living, existing the best way they knew how. dean saw it, and that it was beautiful and miraculous and incredible and something that should be praised every day, every moment, and he did. he didn't stop for creature comforts, he couldn't stay locked in a house or in a steady paying job. he couldn't live such a common life and know that life was slipping him by. he wanted to cherish every breath he took and make every moment of his time wonderful and exciting, the way it should be. schedules don't matter, houses don't matter, all these trinkets and comforts and material things simply don't matter, whatsoever. life is to be attained in the raw, when material life is absent. enlightenment can only be gained when life is pure. dean pursued life with such a lustful, thirsty passion, he took no care for himself or his personal well-being. all that mattered was the pursuit of life, what others called his kicks. people who wanted nothing more than blind existence with false comforts saw dean's actions as "throwing his life away" (what they really meant was throwing his material, false life away) and caring only for himself and his kicks. they were incredibly wrong on that accusation. dean cared nothing for himself...he forgot everything, even himself, in his crazy pursuit for life. he saw everything and did his best to drink everything in, to dig life at its purest. i'm thinking especially of his trip to mexico and his kicks in san francisco and denver with the poor black jazz community. music, the purest form of expression when played by the soul, spoke to him and understood him and drove him. he idolized those who could make the music scream the blues and the craziness of life. he'd devoted his life to living, something that few know how to do. and at the end of the book, the final image of dean is prophetic. the image of him "ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought especially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone...rounding the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again." shunted, however inadvertently, by his friends, penniless and friendless, unable to speak, a dejected angel of humanity mingling in the sleet and the trash and the cold, the one person to have harnessed life's essence and passion. what an incredibly representative image of where peoples' priorities lie. money over life, always. so incredibly sad.
but this book was amazing. astounding. it blew me away, totally. i wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone and everyone. i want to harness the passion of life. i want to dig the road, drink in life at its purest, and lose myself in the craziness of the world. i don't want to waste away doing what should be done and following the proper procedure. god, i never want to waste away in contentedness. i never want to be comfortably numb. if i'm riddled with pain and sadness my whole life, i'd rather have that then the blind stupor of a structured life. to put it in a cliche, give me liberty or give me death.