On the Road (Duluoz Legend)

"Then came spring, the great time of travelling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway mark, after a trip down south with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel at for the very first time."

"Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the promised land, way out there beneath the stars, a across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and could see the greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night."

"With the flashlight to illuminate my way, I climbed the steep walls of the south canyon, got up on the highway streaming with cars frisco-bound in the night, scrambled down the other side, almost falling, and came to the bottom of a ravine where a little farmhouse stood near a creek and where very blessed night the same dog barked at me. Then it was a fast walk along a silvery, dusty road beneath inky trees of California - a road like in The Mask of Zorro and a road like all roads you see in Western B movies. I used to take out my gun and play cowboys in the dark."

"So I stayed another day. It was Sunday. A great heat wave descended; it was a beautiful day, the sun turned red at three. I started up the mountain and got to the top at four. All those lovely California cottonwoods and eucalypti brooded on all sides. Near a peak there were no more trees, just rocks and grass. Cattle were grazing on the top of the coast. There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a Great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the eleven teeming hills."


"Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around he 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 hose awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island city. The high towers of the land - the other end of the land, the place where Papa 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 (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my head. I told it to Dean and he instantly recognised it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because we're all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him then."

"I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realisation of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came. This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there. Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live. Dean had never seen his mother's face. Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment, where was his father? - old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the west. Dean had every right to die the sweet deaths of complete love of his Marylou. I didn't want to interfere, I just wanted to FOLLOW."

"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom digging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angles dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realised that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realised it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of window a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging, bliss, like a big shot of heroine in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die that very moment. But I didn't die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou's hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up."