The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

It was beautiful. The pinkness vanished and then it was all purple dusk and the roar of the silence was like a wash of diamond waves going through the liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand years. I prayed for Japhy, for his future safety and happiness and eventual Buddhahood. It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

And true to what Japhy had predicted, I had absolutely not a jot of appetite for alcohol, I’d forgotten all about it, the altitude was too high, the exercise too heavy, the air too brisk, the air itself was enough to get your drunk ass drunk.

This poor kid ten years younger than I am is making me look like a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn’t got any money: he doesn’t need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.

I gulped when I turned around to look back and see all of the state of California it would seem stretching out in three directions under huge blue skies with frightening planetary space clouds and immense vistas of distant valleys and even plateaus and for all I knew whole Nevadas out there. It was terrifying to look down and see Morley a dreaming spot by the little lake waiting for us.

“That’s what’s the trouble with you Japhy, you’re just an old anarchist scared of society.

“All living and dying things like these dogs and me coming and going without any duration or self substance, O God, and therefore we can’t possibly exist. How strange, how worthy, how good for us! What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.”

Once I told him a line from something, about how one grows through suffering, he said: “If you grow through suffering by this time I oughta be as big as the side of the house.”

So what did I care what the old tobacco-chewing stickwhittlers at the crossroads store had to say about my mortal eccentricity, we all get to be gum in graves anyway.

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.

“Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon,” wrote Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, “then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.”

I recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious about food, and I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody’s food money to blow their heads off anyway.

But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?…But