Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
It’s the birthday of the cat-loving man who defined the Beat Generation (and he doesn’t even get a Google Doodle? come on!). It was lines like this in The Dharma Bums that encouraged my inner hippie, starting back in high school:
“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”
Via my brother, here is a cool project for Kerouac fans: Artist Paul Rogers drew a picture inspired by a line on every page of On The Road and published them in one long continuous “scroll.” Check it out: On The Road: An Illustrated Scroll.
It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today. I’ve said before that The Dharma Bums is not only my favorite of his books, it’s responsible for my hippie tendencies. (It’s also his happiest book. His others are hard for me to read because he’s so sad.)
Since it’s the book I know and love best, there’s no surprise that I have Dharma Bums in my head a lot, whether it’s looking at the mountains here and thinking “You know to me a mountain is a Buddha” or remembering this going up a trail in the forest:
We went on, and I was immensely pleased with the way the trail had a kind of immortal look to it, in the early afternoon now, the way the side of the grassy hill seemed to be clouded with ancient gold dust and the bugs flipped over rocks and the wind sighed in shimmering dances over the hot rocks, and the way the trail would suddenly come into a cool shady part with big trees overhead, and here the light deeper.
…it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greenness, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail…
The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
Like Franny and Zooey, The Dharma Bums is my happy place. Because who doesn’t want to be on a camping trip in the Sierras with Kerouac and Gary Snyder, having camp tea?
Japhy got out the tea, Chinese tea, and sprinkled some in a tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile, a small one to begin with, the sun was still on us, and stuck a long stick tight down under a few big rocks and made himself something to hang the teapot on and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups. I myself’d gotten the water from the stream, which was cold and pure like snow and the crystal-lidded eyes of heaven. Therefore, the tea was by far the most pure and thirstquenching tea I ever drank in all my life, it made you want to drink more and more, it actually quenched your thirst and of course it swam around hot in your belly.
‘Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,’ said Japhy. ‘Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.’
I looked back and like Lot’s wife that did it… Supposing I’d start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding any time anyway […] Finally I came to a kind of ledge where I could sit at a level angle instead of having to cling not to slip, and I nudged my whole body inside the ledge just to hold me there tight, so the wind would not dislodge me, and I looked down and around and I had had it.
It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today, in 1922 (his parents were French Canadian, so “Ti Jean” was the family nickname for him).
I blame Kerouac (and Salinger) for nurturing my hippie tendencies–open any page of The Dharma Bums at an impressionable age, read about hitchhiking and backpacking and mountain climbing, and then throw in something like this? No surprise there.
There were now early spring mornings with the happy dogs, me forgetting the Path of Buddhism and just being glad; looking around at new little birds not yet summer fat; the dogs yawning and almost swallowing my Dharma; the grass waving, hens chuckling. Spring nights, practicing Dhyana under the cloudy moon, I’d see the truth: “Here, this, is It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I’m looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it’s only this poor pitiful world that’s Heaven.”
I think the opening sentence of The Dharma Bums is a really good opening sentence:
Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.