Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

And it’s finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for ‘cities’ at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings’ll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds – So I tell myself ‘Be Wise.’

‘We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season’ – The tree stumps say ‘We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth’ – Men say ‘We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same’ – While the sand says ‘We are sand, we already know,’ and the sea says ‘We are always come and go, fall and plosh.’ – The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me’ – The blue sky adds ‘Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise’

We all agree it’s too big to keep up with, that we’re surrounded by life, that we’ll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it’s empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.

It always makes me proud to love the world somehow – Hate’s so easy compared