LITERATURE: On The Road – Reality

I’m not overwhelmed by the prose, and what Kerouac is journaling (I understand it’s based upon his own experiences) about really may have lost some of its impact through the decades of change that apparently this novel helped get started.

One of the rather incredible points in this book and the idea of reading it now is the narrator’s ability to get through a week or two on ten dollars.  Of course some things don’t change, and "I get by with a little help from my friends" (song lyrics) was one of the driving forces of the times and of this book.  Also, a few penny postcards to his aunt back east cloaked requests for funds.

Maybe it offends the conservative in me who holds self-sufficiency as the ideal, who does with less or without as times demand.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been saved a few times by the generousity of friends but luckily I never needed to ask.  Although it wasn’t hard to notice clothes hanging on my normally 90-lb. frame when a few pounds lost were all the fat I carried.

Since the colorful phrases are fairly far between, let me backtrack to this one:

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice.  Oh where is the girl I love?  I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below.  And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam.  There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded–at least that’s what I thought then. (p. 76)

Sal is standing atop the great cliffs of California, the length of America away from his native New York and Jersey.  The dirty, busy streets of New York are also described as "brown and holy," and I take this as being established, revered, solid as earth.  In New York the sky is often a streak of blue edged by brownstone, a mirror image of the street below that it follows.  California, especially the cities and the areas within them that Sal has seen is no less crowded and dirty, but the sky opens up wider and the coastline gives a view of the ocean from a height that exhilerates, rather than one crowded with a skyline of buildings, freighters, and the imagined blue water of ocean proves to be just a muddy green foam lapping at the docks.