Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words – We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a million years

I could see the peaceful roof of my cabin way below and a half mile away in the old trees, could see the porch, the cot where I slept, and my red handkerchief on the bench beside the cot (a simple little sight: of my handkerchief a half mile away making me unaccountably happy)

‘You go out in joy and in sadness you return,’ says Thomas à Kempis talking about all the fools who go forth for pleasure like high schoolboys on Saturday night hurrying clacking down the sidewalk to the car adjusting their ties and rubbing their hands with anticipatory zeal, only to end up Sunday morning groaning in blearly beds that Mother has to make anyway

he might have secretly wished just a good oldtime fishing trip alone or with his buddies for this year’s vacation – But the PTA has prevailed over every one of his desires by now, 1960s, it’s no time for him to yearn for Big Two Hearted River and the old sloppy pants and string of fish in the tent, or the woodfire with Bourbon at night – It’s time for motels, roadside driveins, bringing napkins to the gang in the car, having the car washed before the return trip – And if he thinks he wants to explore any of the silent secret roads of America it’s no go, the lady in the sneering dark glasses has now become the navigator and sits there sneering over her previously printed blue-lined roadmap distributed by happy executives in neckties to the vacationists of America who would also wear neckties (after having come along so far) but the vacation fashion is sports shirts, long-visored hats, dark glasses, pressed slacks and baby’s first shoes dipped in gold oil dangling from the dashboard

It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism – Says Dave ‘People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they’re walkin around with dirty azzoles – Isnt that amazing?

I’m on Ben Fagan’s floor somehow, apparently I’ve harangued him till dawn about Buddhism – some Buddhist.

poor George just sat there on the mattress for the most part very quiet and told us he was taking this trip to find out if HE was traveling to New York or just the CAR (Willie the Jeep) was traveling to New York or was it just the WHEELS were rolling, or the tires, or what – A Zen problem of some kind

Because after all the poor kid actually believes that there’s something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I’m supposed to be the King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I’m sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I’ll jump up and down and say yes yes that’s right, which I cant do any more – My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing – Like those pathetic live highschool kids who all came to my door in Long Island one night wearing jackets that said ‘Dharma Bums’ on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old according to a mistake on a book jacket and here I am old enough to be their father – But no, hep swinging young jazzy Ron wants to dig everything, go to the beach, run and romp and sing, talk, write tunes, write stories, climb mountains, go hiking, see everything, do everything with everybody

Strange sad desultory the way families and people sorta scatter around a beach and look vaguely at the sea, all disorganized and picnic sad