On The Road

The other night I finished Jack Kerouac's "On The Road." The mythos surrounding that novel is such--that it inspired all these hippies to go hitch-hiking across the country in the 60s and so forth--that I was expecting this grand romanticized memoir of the glories of exploring the highways of America, perhaps riding freight trains, eating out at diners, frolicking the amber fields of grain and how "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 and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww..." and etc, etc.

Well, Kerouac is certainly nostalgic, and often sentimental, but never romantic; he pulls no punches, he doesn't sanitize the hitch-hiker's life at all. The travails of being constantly broke, constantly hungry, car troubles, thefts, the betrayals of those unstable "mad" friends you love, are all on full, unvarnished, unapologetic display. In fact I'm left scratching my head as to why any body, even hippies, felt so inspired by this book to try it out themselves.

No freight-train jumping like in the movies, no fascinating diner conversation, and frankly little description of the American landscape beyond what you would actually have to have seen in person to understand (maybe that's why people went traveling, to see what Kerouac was referencing). The prose style, as one can see from the above passage, is in this manic style that refuses to sit still on any one scene or thought, much like "the mad ones" populating the narrative, who can never bare to stay in one spot. But although Kerouac is clearly enthralled with the traveling experience, the overall tone of the book is one of melancholy--I sense that the novel is more about the loss of time than anything on the road, that the narrator mourns both all the opportunities lost because he was always on the road, as well as mourning all he'll miss because he's no longer on the road.

But then, as unromantic and melancholy as "On The Road" ultimately is, I sense that it's still a good thing I finished it before I graduated, because if I was still reading it after I finished school and while unemployed, I might have done something stupid myself, and gone hitchhiking myself. The novel does put a taste in your mouth for the all-consuming madness, the one that's self-destructive but then that's sort of the point, to not fill up just a single point in space and time but to be torn apart and thus fill all the universe and eternity--

Did I mention Kerouac was Catholic? They're the ones (unlike the Protestants) with an actual bloodied Savior hanging on their crosses. A desecration that elevates, a misery that exalts, I believe it was a religious experience that Kerouac was seeking on the road.