Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Distant Voices: Jack Kerouac

Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo! I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bards of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway [...] I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young people wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

- Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, chapter 13

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