finished reading

I have just finished reading Kerouac's On The Road. It is going up as one of my favourite books.


It ends in Mexico, before Sal heads back to New York. Another one of my favourite paragraphs occurs climatically at the end of the book, when they were en route to Mexico City via mountainous roads, and they encounter the indigenous Indians that reside there. Sal and Dean and his friends have been living life decadently, typically, with drugs and sex and alcohol and all that has been popularised as decadence in the cities. A sudden contrast occurs when they hit the tropics and mountains that the road leads them to:

As we climbed, the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders. They hailed us desperately; we stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them; moreover they were very young, some of them eleven and looking almost thirty. 'Look at those eyes!' breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus. And they stared unflinching into ours. [...]

I think one will only use rapturous imagery and spiritual analogies like Kerouac has done here, when human images can no longer define what is being experienced. It is hard to write well, if you have a lack in your storehouse of extreme experiences. Everything will seem bland, monotonous writing with no contrasts, and hardly any living. Sometimes you have to write about things bigger than yourself, to capture your audience up there with you. It can be extremes of anything, highs and pleasures, encounters with God, depression beyond the mind. I think that any writing that lacks that will lack, doubtlessly. It will become like, news reporting? Or just general fare that no one will truly enjoy reading, because it never changes anything.


What did I see when I read this? I saw images of brown children with discolourations in their hair from malnourishment, covered in dust from the streets; the only images closest possible to what they saw, for I have not been to South America, so what I can conjure up in my mind are the Asian parallels I have seen.


















Street kids at the immigration checkpoint of border town of Poi Pet, Cambodia.




I have finished this book, and I know I won't stop reading, nor writing, for that matter.