6 — On The Road/Jack Kerouac
On The Road was, according to the internet, the “Harry Potter” of the 50's/early 60’s. As someone who came home and watched all 8 Harry Potter movies in one Christmas break, that is a very bold statement. Harry Potter is a sacred story whose impact on the people of our generation, I don’t doubt, will echo throughout our lives. Did I get that feeling, that feeling of knowing and understanding, of being given a voice, with Kerouac and the characters of On The Road? Well, no.
“…because 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 roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a phenomenal story, and bizarrely real in my life. The years long “road trip” these Beat generation humans go on starts on the East coast in New York, winds through the midwest that’s most familiar to me; Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and finally Wyoming before they stop for a while in Denver. Wyoming, for those that don’t know, is something of a suburb of Denver, and the places they go, streets they name, are familiar to me. Which is pretty weird, hearing a long dead voice echoing out of history, going on your same quest. Like me, they continued on from there to California, through Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and finally through Sacramento to SF.
“…never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
My first instinct is to say that the difference between Harry Potter and On The Road is that Harry Potter is not literary. Where as On The Road is meant to be a portrait of a generation and their listlessness, a stream-of-consciousness piece of writing that was famously written on a single length of paper that Kerouac taped together as he went. But I want to reject this theory. In 50 years, will our grandchildren look back on Harry Potter and think, “Wow, this is hard to read, why did people write so strangely back then?” Are we, as 1984 suggested, shrinking our language instead of growing it? (Merriam-Webster did make an emoji the word of the year…) I can’t say.
“But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry…”
This story did effortlessly capture what it means to be (forgive the cliche) young and restless. Maybe our generation isn’t one of aimless road trips and hitchhiking, but we have these same feelings of being lost, confused, and frankly, a little addicted to worry.
“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. That is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
Plus I learned these words, which really the two of them sum up a good bit of the story;
Virile: (in a man) having strength, energy, and strong sex drive
Magniloquently: using high-flown or bombastic language
In the end, I think I need more time with On The Road. The Beat generation, whose bible this book is, is described by Kerouac as being “reduced to the bedrock of consciousness…being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself…to be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up.” These are places I’ve been, but I’m not sure, just yet, what they meant to me.
8 — Daring Greatly/Brene Brown
