Brain Food #410
Where you end up when you have nowhere to go
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Literary iconoclast Jack Kerouac is mostly known for having authored one of the greatest travel books of all time. On The Road, known for its spontaneous prose, preaches the significance of travelling (or writing) with nowhere specific to go.
On The Road was written in just three weeks, but it took it more than five years to reach its readers for the first time, facing resistance from publishers and critics alike. Kerouac did not seem to be in a hurry.
His writing, like his characters, was free-spirited, not abiding by any rules, meandering and flowing without conveying any certainty about where exactly it would end up.
Very often, when thoughts are not preoccupied with an end result, great clarity can be achieved.
Here are some of Kerouac’s unique moments:
On the elusiveness of happiness:
“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream.”
On the absurdity of it all:
“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
On the burden of goodbyes:
“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
