more about On The Road - on passion

I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. 'And what else do you do for fun?' I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done - whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. 'What do you want out of life?' I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother's for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear - something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. 'What do you do on Sunday afternoons?' I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. 'What do you do on a warm summer's night?' She sat on the porch, she watched the cars on the road. She and her mother made popcorn. 'What does your father do on a summer's night?' He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he's spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration.'What does your brother do on a summer's night?' He rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain. 'What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?' She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

From On The Road, Jack Kerouac.

Some people speak of even the simplest things with passion, and some, simply without. Funny how a bum like Sal Paradise has it, it as in, a passion for life, albeit in pleasure, and it is up to him to tell the others, the readers, how not having it is as good as being lost.


Isn't passion so important?


I don't want to be lost, in Kerouac's terms: sleepy, empty, regretful. Where is my passion; and am I actually doing anything about it, or merely holding it in with the past generations, with chagrin as he says?


If we have passion for the simple things, even the wayward things, as so it will seem in On The Road, then we can also draw passion for the great things that will change this generation, and those to come.


I draw a parallel from the Bible's story about the woman at the well. She spoke out against Jesus without restraint: why are you talking to me, I am a Samaritan, you are a Jew, we don't associate! It may seem wrong to question God's authority and actions, but if she hadn't done that so boldly, and had walked away, she might never have found out that Jesus had living water for her. And with the same fire and forthrightness in her spirit, she went and told her whole village about the prophetic things that Jesus shared with her at the well.


The virtue of passion, and in it, forthrightness, courage, these cut both ways. It merely takes knowledge and wisdom, to direct it. To get this knowledge, you have just got to find it, ask for it, meet the right people, read the right stuff.


But without passion, there is little to direct any where.