On the Road - Jack Kerouac [146]
“Oh, we shouldn’t let him go like this. What’ll we do?”
Old Dean’s gone, I thought, and out loud I said, “He’ll be all right.” And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
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KEROUAC IN HARDCOVER (editor’s choice)
ON THE ROAD
Hailed by The New York Times as the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet of the Beat Generation, On the Road is the kind of book people read, reread, and take to heart. Experience anew the classic story that broke open conformist 1950s America. This beautiful hardcover edition has been published to celebrate On the Road’s fortieth anniversary and makes an ideal gift or complement to the old battered paperback edition fans now own.
ISBN 0-670-87478-7
SOME OF THE DHARMA
Written at the height of Kerouac’s commitment to Buddhism, Some of the Dharma confirms that he was not only “on the road” but also “on the path.” Begun as reading notes for Allen Ginsberg, the book evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of experimental non-fiction into which Kerouac poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches, blues, and more. An intricate word mosaic, it is visually complex: each page is unique, filled with patterns and interlocking pieces of text.