Sal Paradise has a mad friend, Dean Moriarty, who is constantly sweating with excitement about everything. Although he may seem like a bum, which he is, yet his thirst for new things, and his passion for music and for being with people, are inspiring enough.
Sal himself, takes in every sight and scene he comes across in his America. To him, the road and all it contains, are almost enough for life itself. He words the pictures and colours he sees: the sun is red, the Mexican girl is honey-coloured. He describes the deserts, the salt plains, the oil-scented air of Texas, the dust of New York, the streets everywhere, the life of the people.
And they say, in all of these things, there must be a God. I agree.
I have yet to see such excitement myself about pure travel, I thought I had it when I saw the mountains of Kazakstan, or read it second-hand about India through Popagandhi. But all that I have experienced are trails of the levels of excitement in On The Road. They are but trails. Today we rely on movies and info-documentaries and such to tell us the beauty of this world. But if a writer can bring across to you, the passion involved in every beat of the jazz musician's drum, make you imagine lights and sounds that are directly teleported from the late 40s to you, right here right now, then that is a true writer's art, the experience conquers even that of some films and other visual displays.
I am three-quarters done completing this book, and there have been no regrets since I started. What will this book accomplish? It is not sad, like some books. It makes me desire to travel like they do, perhaps America too, but my heart is with Asia. I hunger for jazz; but my DVD player is now defunct and my house is no longer loungey for the mess; I will have to overhaul my home through cleaning and clearing up, and get a new music player - or better, go see live jazz music for kicks, as Dean and Sal put it. Or, as Hanif Kureishi, another favourite author of mine, puts it via review on the cover of the book: "It changed the way I saw the world, making me yearn for fresh experience." What indeed, have we been missing out on? We need to live more, and take in every experience.
And reading Kerouac, makes me hope that my writing will improve even more. His writing style, what he has termed as spontaneous prose, brings to mind the need to always be writing, always be thinking about your thoughts, the need to take in everything with your eyes. When reading his sentences, I feel that he has less regard for the form of the sentence, but rather, he merely uses each sentence because he wants to tell you about what he is on about at that moment, and if it needs to be a long sentence with semi-colons and commas, then so be it, or if just one short five-word sentence, then so be it too. There is no forced stylistic effort, and that is exactly the way I like it. He coins slangs through over-using certain words in his own way, hence the word 'beat' comes about (as in, 'it was a beat suitcase', 'he looked beat', like saying 'worn', but without the preposition), alongside other words like 'kicks' and 'dig'. I think that also helps to create that generation, that experience, that character, that Kerouac is portraying through his book. Just like how Bridget Jones (Helen Fielding) is known for 'v.good' and 'oh my bloody god and fuck' etc, it creates the character.
Writing about Kerouac makes me want to write too. It also makes me realise that I like semi-autobiographical novels, as I think of D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, which is another book I like. Seeing that I have no patience to create characters and stories from thin air or through stitching real life with completely fictional ideas, I think if I were to ever write a novel, it would have to be semi-autobiographical too. The very thought that a novel I read is semi-autobiographical makes it appealing too, because it means that these thoughts are real, the writer really thought about it this way once, and as I read it, it is as if that thought transcends time and continent to come to me, right where I am.
"Our battered suitacases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
From On The Road.
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