After reading ‘On the Road’, I definitely caught the breeze of a free-wheeling, music-loving lifestyle wherein the characters feel deeply and live wildly.
I had difficulty choosing excerpts from Kerouac’s gorgeous, hopeful, yet at the same time, dingy prose. My words don’t measure up to the seamless stream of the author’s pen. So in the place of my weak attempt at conveying why I found enjoyment in this American odyssey, I rely on these passages. Read the book and see if the words and characters don’t roll into your head as the wheels roll across the continent.
“And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up.”
“Great beautiful clouds floated overhead, valley clouds that made you feel the vastness of old tumbledown holy America from mouth to mouth and tip to tip.”
“And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; …We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, MOVE.”
“Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas, threw in the clutch, and negotiated every hairpin turn and passed cars and did everything in the books without the benefit of accelerator.” …”In this was we floated and flapped down to the San Joaquin Valley. It lay spread a mile below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous from our aerial shelf. We made thirty miles without using gas.”
“Dean’s California-wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”
And I now see how Natalie Merchant’s rambling musical poetry of ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ gave me glimpses of the exploits of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty long before I eventually found author Jack Kerouac for myself.
Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother
And the tears she cried, they were cried for none other…
…Hey Jack, now for the tricky part,
When you were the brightest star, who were the shadows?…
…You chose your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls
In Harlem, howling at night.
What a tear stained shock of the world,
You’ve gone away without saying goodbye.
Natalie Merchant / Robert Buck
Hey Jack Kerouac lyrics © Christian Burial Music
10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe 1987