The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under and meditate on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world. We had a perfect little kitchen with a gas stove, but no icebox, but no matter. We also had a perfect little bathroom with a tub and hot water, and one main room, covered with pillows and floor mats of straw and mattresses to sleep on, and books, books, hundreds of books everything from Catullus to Pound to Blyth to albums of Bach and Beethoven (and even one swinging Ella Fitzgerald album with Clark Terry very interesting on trumpet) and a good three-speed Webcor phonograph that played loud enough to blast the roof off: and the roof nothing but plywood, the walls too, through which one night in one of our Zen Lunatic drunks I put my fist in glee and Coughlin saw me and put his head through about three inches.
–Jack Kerouac, “The Dharma Bums”
One thinks of Jack Kerouac as an “enfant terrible” for that’s what the fifties media made of him–the only kindness the man ever received in New York came from Steve Allen–and so only those who loved the lyric or who still love it understood or still appreciate the shy, clear, emotional candor in his writing. The narrator of “The Dharma Buns” possesses much heart and has a good eye. But he has something more: when he’s in a place he’s really in it.
The sun isn’t up yet here in upstate New York. There’s a steam pipe inside my kitchen wall that sounds like a song in a dream–maybe someone else’s dream–it would be the first thing you’d hear as you took the hand of the sleeper beside you. It makes a sweet, three dimensional sound like the needle on a gramophone or the hollow realizations of a stethoscope. From such small evidence we know it’s fine to be alive, to have tried it out.
Planet of the Blind 