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perpetual opposition is what brings about a reaffirmation of life
“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
Cassady”/Dean Moriarty’s refrain of “We know time” is a call to spontaneity, to living totally subjectively in and for the moment. In so doing, he suspends the authority of Time over the individual: “Now is that time [emphasis added],” Neal/Dean echoes the Charlie Parker classic.
The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie.
writing or painting
In all, what Neal was, simply, was tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and also to get involved with people that would otherwise pay no attention to him.
buddies…they rushed down the street together digging everything
the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.
“Besides said the man there’s no traffic passes through six…if
It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.
“That last thing is what you can’t get, Allen. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all…”
like a man watching the mechanism of a watch that reached clear to the top of Berthoud pass and yet was made with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in the world.
“What gloom!” cried the baritone rising out of the dungeon under a groaning stone…. I cried for it. That’s how I see life too.
They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk---real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief.
Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.
Why else should I live?
It was the end of the continent, no more land. Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all this.
Everybody goes home in October.
grand odyssiac logs of our continental dream.
He
Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under his father’s roof, then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.
My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.
husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home---and get on their knees---and ask for forgiveness---and the women bless them---peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.
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- -tho we hate to admit it- -in death.
This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
It was 3 children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries balooning in the dark before them.
Only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the very portals of the womb with a completely physical realization of the sources of life-bliss; trying to get back in there once and for all, while living, and adding to it the living sexual frenzy and rhythm. This is the result of years looking at dirty pictures behind bars; looking at the legs of women in magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there.
At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.
