Kerouac The Poet.

Kerouac’s On the Road is a crazy trip of people and places and substances and Sal Paradise drinking it in like he’s been thirsty all his life, but there are these paragraphs where you can feel Kerouac sink into a rhythm of writing and you feel real, honest longing. Poetry pours out of him and it feels like time and madness have stopped for a brief moment, and then you’re off and running again, to the next town and party and the madness of the road goes on. I have a feeling that whichever book I choose next, I’ll still long for the crazy whirl that is Kerouac The Poet…

These are my favorite passages :

“Trains howl away across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled – Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

“I wished I was on her bus. A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

[Image.]