On The Road, Jack Kerouac
5/02 to 10/02
Dean:
On Nietzsche:
“Everything is fine, god exists, we know time.”
On America:
“I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side”
After a confusing story:
“This is night, what it does to you. I have nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion”
Well written, no?
Dean appreciates people, he know everyone is fascinating somehow. One just has to find it and he was willing to dig.
“All alone in the night I had my own thoughts and held the car to the white line in the holy road” What was I doing, where was I going? I’d soon find out.
Old Bull, a guy who wants to taste it all, Paris, London, Istanbul, Chi-town, Do what the locals do, for the experience
Apparently has multiple personalities. One a middle one, an old Negro man says “Some’s bastards, some’s aint and that’s the score” (True enough)
On those you leave behind:
“They stand, uncertainly underneath immense skies and everything about them is drowned, where go, what do, sleep.”
When Sal caught up w/ Dean in Frisco:
“Apparently Dean had been quiet for a few months; now the angle had arrive and he was going mad again”
Perhaps the best quote of the book, while Dean and Sal go east:
“The point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE. Now you just dig them, up in front, they have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there- and all the time, they’ll get there anyway, you see.”
“Around this lonely night stretched hundreds of miles of plains. The kind of utter darkness that falls on a prairie that is inconceivable to an Easterner. There were no starts, no moon; no light whatsoever except the light of a kitchen what lay beyond the shadows of the yard was an endless view of the world that you wouldn’t be able to see till dawn.”
On going to Mexico City:
“Besides, he knew the road would get more interesting, especially ahead, always ahead”
