On the Road

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

Called "The novel that defined a generation", and, "The quintessential American vision of freedom and hope."  I found Jack Kerouac's best selling book and literary classic an eerily compelling, dangerously provocative, and anarchic tale of gypsy life with no Gypsy Nation.  There was no purpose to being on the road other than seeking 'kicks' through substance abuse, sex, and living as low, or 'beat', as the generation is called, as you can.

Work as little as you must and live to leave the ones you should be closest to to dance and drink and smoke and needle your way to the next high with the ones you think are your best friends. The definition of 'Beat' is not 'rhythm', which I have thought it was all these years.  The def truly is what it sounds like: beat up, broken down. And the 'beatnik' is not the silly guy portrayed on the Dobie Gillis Show or the artsy emaciated beret wearing wine drinker in the blues bar in Greenwich Village, but the hobo. The tramp, tramping or driving the roads and railroads of North America.

"On the Road" is a mid-twentieth century Kerouac bi-opic-novel re-make of Jack London's actual bio "The Road" in which London rides the rails before highways were high or even very good ways from coast to coast.

So why did I read it?  And why did I finish such a non-productive, darkly depressing at times book when there are so many much better, more uplifting books to be read in my more and more finite life?  Because in reading this book I saw myself, saved only by the grace of God and an amazing wife. I could have been Sal Paradise, the Kerouac character in the book, following, indeed mesmerized by the charismatic character Dean Moriarty into doing things and being a person of, at times, no redeeming value other than to himself.

I thank God that the next high, the next kick, is not for me the 'quintessential American vision of freedom and hope.  My hope is in a much more sure place than the next hit or bottle or bed.  My freedom is with my life partner on a road filled with new and old friends, none of which, I pray, are forgotten. Or, as Dean Moriarty would have it, dropped off the edge of his world.

I read the book, perhaps, to see what my life might have been, if...  Now it's read.  And I move on from it's learning to literary joys far more high than any joint or pill Jack Kerouac ever tried.

-Ken