Taking a return trip to Kerouac's world
By Nathan Gunter
Student Columnist

For some reason lately I can’t stay out of Border’s. I go in there and I browse, poring through the literature section for something I can read that will satiate this need I have to absorb every bit of the world, of culture, of knowledge there is. But my problem is that I never can pick out a book. I’ll pass by The Scarlet Letter, or Crime and Punishment, and think how moved I was by these stories, and consider purchasing new copies to make new notes in new margins … but can’t bring myself to do it.

There’s one book always standing in my way. I’ve read it probably five or six times since my junior year of high school, and I can’t seem to escape its pull. I don’t know why. It’s not taught in schools – when my junior year English teacher saw that I was reading it, she threatened to take it away.

I’ve owned two copies and given both away to foreign exchange students. Again, don’t know why. Just something I did.

On the Road. Jack Kerouac. I cannot get enough of this book.

And every time I go into the bookstore, I pass by the multiple copies of this book and think to myself, You’ve spent almost $30 on copies of this book. You’ve already read it more times than you’ve read some books of the Bible. Why?

But as I browse through the literature section, and then over into philosophy, and religion, through self-help (always a good laugh) and back again, I find myself longing for the story of a man who travels back and forth across America in the blur and hype of postwar Beat Generation hypnosis. I imagine putting on a really good jazz mix – maybe some Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and his Orchestra or some Miles – you’ve gotta have some Miles.

Or perhaps I’ll drive out to Pilate Mountain, hike to the top and look down over my America and relax with this great narrative. With sentences that stretch over entire paragraphs and seem to throb to some beat that Kerouac must’ve had pounding through his head the whole time.

Maybe someday I’ll take a bus from New York to Denver just to discover the West of my childhood again. Maybe someday America will sing to me like it did to him, with promise and nurture. What I love about Kerouac is that to him, life is an adventure to be lived to the fullest, even though it’s clear he has no clue how to do that.

So until I read this book again, I won’t be able to pick up a new Dostoevsky novel or some Shakespeare I have left untouched. The poetry of W.B. Yeats or Rainer Maria Rilke will remain unopened on my shelves until I’ve gotten to know Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty again and traveled with them across the vast expanses of a country in a period of such change and renewal.

Maybe my patriotism in light of recent events is reasserting itself in this very strange way. The Beat Generation was certainly a uniquely American literary phenomenon in its beginnings, and part of me wants to grasp hold of that, to see what this country was birthing when my parents came into the world. Because my generation certainly has yet to figure itself out.

Maybe I’ve been shaken awake and don’t quite know how to express myself these days, so I long for something familiar and yet completely unknown. Maybe I long for a character who seems to know me as well as Sal does, who longs for the same places and people I do, “people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

Maybe I’m just an aesthetic.

Looks like Fear and Trembling is next…