![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss blindly seeking to return the way he came. “I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Matt Weiland, “You Don’t Know Jack,” The New York Times, August 19, 2007. ![]() This is the great, lasting appeal of ‘On the Road,’ the reason it will continue to matter to readers for another half-century and more.” In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy optimism and a yearning for solace a thousand times richer and subtler than the mournful sap that drips down from so many contemporary American films and novels. “Above all, ‘On the Road’ matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. The book is a hymn to purposelessness, an antidote to what John Fowles once decried as our modern ‘addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield’ in everything we do. “What matters about ‘On the Road’ is the book’s raw energy yoked to its sense of promise in ‘all that raw land,’ the shove it offers to get out of one’s own chair and see what lies over the horizon. ![]()
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