Fear and Loathing on the Road

‘No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.’

These words, written by Jack Kerouac in 1960, stirred me. Even before reading them, I had been haunted by the romantic idea that one must get lost before one can find oneself. Unfortunately, being weighed down by parental dependence, the philosophical revolution of the self that I craved was not going to happen in one big bang. It was going to have to come little by little. An early starter in the world of rebellion, I would choose to replace my breakfast croissants with Jaffa Cakes, at the tenderly immature age of 10. The most productive days of my insubordination came during mid teenage years, with an abundance of forbidden sex and consumption of contraband tending to make up the majority of them. Still, no matter how hard I kicked out against the world, I couldn’t help feel like an anarchic fish in a conservative pond.

Fast forward to the near past, I was preparing to embark upon an adventure with two old friends. One had already been travelling for two years, having decided to take an eternal gap year, with nothing but his guitar and 24 spare strings he told us. Harbouring a hatred for Facebook, he would refuse his picture being taken, through fear of them being abused once he became famous. The other, slightly more grounded in life, had been working at a Marseille hospital, accumulating work experience for a medical school application. He owned a Peugeot 308. Do not ask me for her specifications, for I know as much about cars as the Pope does about anal stimulation. All I know is that we felt G-force whenever Peugeot touched 60 and that Peugeot wasn’t actually called Peugeot at all.

‘Elle s'appelle Moulin’, I was told. She had a strange looking windmill attached to the top, a sort of touristy souvenir. ‘Of course’, I said, ‘that explains the windmill.’ He smiled at me, returning, ‘Mulan, not Moulin. She came from China and they told me she was a he.’

We were to hit the road, destination unknown. Admittedly, it wasn’t going to be the solitary wandering of the wilderness I had desired, but it would allow me an iota of independence which seemed to be a lot. We left behind our watches, our mobile phones and Daddy’s credit card. Armed with 300 Euros between us, five empty bottles of sprite filled with petrol, a plethora of musical pleasures and a bag of Dylan’s finest muse, we wrote the first sentence of our own bildungsroman; fear and loathing on the road.

We headed south, as most trippers do. The conversation was frivolously deep, ranging from alcoholic masturbation to the meaning of life. We met people along the way. Strangers we had once not known, we now knew. They did not change our lives. And, we did not change theirs. We each had our own reasons for travelling. We knew that the nature of these reasons rested somewhere in our minds, but we could not articulate them to anyone but ourselves.

One pivotal night, to the sound of our musician reciting Bob Dylan’s Visions of Johanna, we debated the existence of the stars. He believed they were eternal, I believed they were finite and would fade away. Apparently, we were both wrong. As our mutual friend took great pleasure in highlighting his scientific superiority over us, he gave an open air lecture, loaded with mundane jargon, on the nature of the light year and the creation of the star. What he was telling us, I think, was that what we see is not what exists. Select a star in the sky; we see it, but it is not actually there. It once burned bright, but the light had so far to travel that the star actually died out by the time it reached us. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was under the hypnotic influence of what had entered my system that night that I began to feel so overwhelmed. Looking into the sky is looking into the past. I climbed to the top of the car and sat. Staring at the stars, I wrote, ‘How curious it is that you need light to see most things, but you can only see the stars when everything else is dark.’ Looking back, I don’t know what that means, it’s just a sentence of self indulgent pomposity, but I love that I wrote it. The three of us are all writers in our own way. One writes his words, the other writes his music, the third rights our wrongs.

I didn’t find myself on that trip, but I found something more important. I found a personal philosophy, a way to live my life the way I wanted to live it. I formed the opinion that, the quest for meaning, which I originally sought, was just insignificant shadow chasing. Indeed, the trip itself seemed highly insignificant up until this point. We had failed to do anything other than drink, smoke and banter. Then again, Gandhi did say that everything we do seems insignificant, but it is significant that we do it. How right he was.

France is a beautiful country that I know all too well. She is spoiled with splendid treasures, but I did not enter one museum, nor did I take one photograph. For, laid on top of Mulan, beside the touristy windmill, I came to realise that life isn’t about where we come from or where we go, it’s about what we do in between. The fact that we were in a country we each knew so well made no difference to the experience, for we could have been anywhere. It didn’t matter where we were, but rather how we existed there, if we existed at all. The beauty of that road trip lied in the fact that we were free of time, free of commitment, free of the burdens of life. For we had no final destination we had to reach; we were just travelling.

Add Comment

You must log in to submit a comment.