“On the road” with Jack Kerouac and the beatniks

When in need of something reassuring, I always turn to classics for good old, solid reads. One book I have picked up recently is Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

“On the Road” is the defining novel that embodied the freewheeling soul of the postwar Beats movement, a cultural movement that experimented with drugs, sexuality and traditions. It was truly liberating to be with Kerouac and friends as they wheeze down the many mad and carefree road trips through the vast lands of America.

“We flashed past the mysterious white signs in the night somewhere in New Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) and WEST (with an arrow) and took the south one. New Orleans! It burned in our brains. From the dirty snows of ‘frosty fagtown New York,’ as Dean called it, all the way to the greeneries and river smells of old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom of America; then west. Ed was in the back seat; Marylou and Dean and I sat in front and had the warmest talk about the goodness and joy of life.”

Having read the book before I scooted off for a holiday, it turned out to be a wonderful pre-travel read to experience the erratic writing and exploding energies of Kerouac’s wanderlust experiences. Below are three of my favorite parts from the book:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

“Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream – grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land – the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.”“Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced in death. But who wants to die?”

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