Going Through Changes

On The Road (2-3)

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

[Kerouac, 54]


Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk--real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

[Kerouac, 58]

Haunted -- the echo of Mr. Whittier

and the recorded echo, it echoes. An echo of an echo of an echo. // Echoing, until a voice from far away, from behind the sun, says:

"You're playing to an empty house. // Listen to yourselves--you're so busy telling your stories to each other. You're always turning the past into a story to make yourselves right. -- our culture of blame -- It never changes. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves. // Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories... // Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us. It's how we digest our lives. Our experience. You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories the same way this theater seems to digest people. Other events--the ones you can't digest--they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can't talk about, they rot you from the inside out. But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell--you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good."

[Palahniuk, 380-381]


If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world. But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer. Would it be so bad? To be the last two people in the world? Why can't the world end the same way it started?

[Palahniuk, 383]

On The Road (1)

Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks--and there are a lot of them in Des Moines--and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow window shades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing this hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I was scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

[Kerouac, 15]