Have you read? On the Road

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

This – my first encounter with Jack – was an unforgettable occasion; he bought me whiskey and got me drunk on anticipation, we danced to the swinging backbeat of the city limits, swum the furrows of every last rolling hillside, and he laid next to me beneath a ceiling of stars and taught me how to dream.

One of the founding fathers of the American post-war ‘beat generation’, Kerouac, like his friends and collaborators Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs both documented and inspired. Forging a template of sexual experimentation, a rejection of materialism, and the idealising of exuberant and unexpurgated means of expression; the late 1950s and early 1960s were a rife with writings of spontaneous creativity beneath the all-seeing eye of a dawning sun in peach and apricot.

Arguably his strongest and certainly most widely-recognised novel, On the Road sees his stream-of-consciousness, spontaneous prose fully realised. Essentially an autobiographical road-movie documenting his travels across 50s America, Jack scrawled candid, unfolding visions inside notebooks, across papers and shaped them in his mind; he wrote in bus depots, ships, bars, cars and with whomever could accommodate him during his on-going quest for belonging.

Incorporating a burgeoning roster of his friends – whom for publishing reasons, were given aliases – the catalyst for much of the plot was a letter he received from fellow visionary Neal Cassady (alias Dean Mariarty). Narrated by Jack’s alias Sal Paradise, his fascination with humanity led him - and his eclectic group of friends – across the continent with no more than fifty dollars in his pocket. I would listen with intent as he told me his stories; the jazz scene in Chicago that kicked around the street-lit puddles, being a night watchman in that infernal boarding camp for merchant sailors, drinking on the job, how the most mundane of settings are transformed through love for a young girl, sitting with her as the sun sunk into the vast purple hills and the glorious freedom of Dean Mariarty – ‘son of a wino’.

As I leaf through Jack’s photo album, every corner is covered, every room explored. I drew tears across the page as he became more and more estranged and dissatisfied with what he found on the road. When the sun began to set, and the gently lapping waves began to tug at the land’s hem, he reminisced upon all that had passed before him:

‘Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old’. That certainly hasn’t stopped me from trying to find the answer.

Thank you, Jack.

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