- Jack Kerouac,
On the RoadAnd for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.
Absolutely. It blew my mind when I read it. Here was this book which I expected to be all plot, just a story of Kerouac's travels across the U.S., and then suddenly he phase-shifts from the physical realm into a direct experience of psychedelic quintessence. Though you can't discern it from the quote I posted, this whole passage happens right in the middle of a relatively mundane event. Sal Paradise (Kerouac) is wandering around the streets of San Francisco with no real purpose when he suddenly starts to interpret strange meanings in people and things around him, and then dives into this ecstatic reverie before slipping out of it and returning his awareness to his wandering the streets picking up cigarette butts and smoking them. I was on a train in Japan when I read it--on my way to go see a music festival in Osaka with my sister--and I had to put the book down for a minute and take a look around at where I was. It was like the passage directly mirrored my experience of reading the book: I was traveling through an unfamiliar place when my awareness shifted away from my surroundings into the orthogonal space of Kerouac's imagination. I got this weird, familiar sense of universality.
Does he? It's been awhile. If I can distract you a moment didn't Kerouac take offense to how his book was interpreted? Wasn't he making fun of all the posers? The faux beatniks pretending to give a shit about the counterculture?
That's all pretty accurate -- all he ever was was a homeless drunk who liked to make memories and had a gift for writing them down. Parallels to Dylan ... important to remember that by the time On the Road was finally published Kerouac was a very different person. Had a Buddhist phase and was also drinking heavily.