Kerouac’s roar

by DRM

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in oth­ers but give them life, and not only life, but that great con­scious­ness of life.“
— Jack Kerouac

The first time that I read On the Road, it took days for the roar to sub­side. The world Ker­ouac painted was wild and rich, filled with lust and love and dis­cov­ery and mean­ing that felt like they were wait­ing just out­side the edge of my life. I was 16. I’d already made my own trip across the end­less roads of the coun­try with a friend two years before. What we had expe­ri­enced had over­whelmed our senses; Kerouac’s mad rush of words made some of it make sense.

Here’s the thing I found out as I went out into the world and gath­ered facts and expe­ri­ence. The rest­less race to bust open the world took its toll on frag­ile genius. Ker­ouac retreated to his mother’s den, a drunk filled by a dark las­si­tude, impo­tent once the bull-rush of words got spent.

There was love around him, this hand­some and ath­letic young man who went to col­lege in New York ready for an all-American expe­ri­ence, and whose curios­ity and pas­sion led him into the under­belly, where he found rap­ture and laugh­ter, wis­dom and irony. Too sad, that love was beyond his grasp, and he spent hun­dreds of thou­sands of words, writ­ing in ever tight­en­ing cir­cles, to try to grab on to it.

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