Reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac has been an interesting experience. I'm reading the infamous original scroll. Legend has it that Kerouac sat down at a type writer and purged this entire story in one go, and it came out on one long sheet of paper. No paragraphs. Bad punctuation.
It's interesting reading this version because I find that I am frequently editing the piece in my head. A comma should go here, I could make a new paragraph here. This isn't even a word.
Nevertheless, it has been an enthralling journey, one that I will be done with in about 20 pages, or about an hour.
What struck me a few days ago, and has been scrawled in my agenda ever since, is that amidst this text that is very outside my own experience I found a direct parallel to my life. This is something I used to do on the school bus or on the yearly 2 day road trip to Cape Breton:
I told Neal that when I was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scynthe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. (305)
Common experience. I guess we're all not as different as we seem.
No comments:
Post a Comment