Bill's Notes

Paul Burgess reminds me that today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Read Paul's entry — it's outstanding.

I read On The Road in 1988, just as I was sobering up. The book came as a big surprise — Kerouac seemed far different than what I expected. The book was lighter, more ecstatic, but more disciplined than what I was expecting. Kerouac himself is a bit confusing to people — he was a conservative, a Buckley-loving conservative, and a kind of Catholic mystic. He reminded us that Christianity doesn't mean middle-class conformity. And he's not to be judged by his followers.

I dunno. Something about that book just pulls you, though unlike Burgess, the only line I can remember is the last line:

... so in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out [...] the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Ever since Gatsby, American writers have to deal with this ending, what many consider (including me) the greatest page of American lit ever written:

“As the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Kerouac — he stayed focused on that "transitory enchanted moment," he desired that "aesthetic contemplation," he stayed with it to the end, and I think that's why Kerouac has such a hold ... God bless him.