Oh, Jack Kerouac

You come thundering into my life quite unexpectedly, with the sharpest and rawest of insights and barely controlled passion, and awe me with visions like these:

The great harsh ragged skies of October were everywhere around with their huge tumultuous clouds and their premonitions of awful darkness, and the winds began to blow all demented with blown leaves and dust and dark fury --

In the closing moments of the final period the piteous songs of the losing side were raised by choirs of faithful alumni, and fifes blew on the field, and muffled drums dolorously beat out the doom of certain hopes and certain destiny.

She promptly came out in a bus across the massive land... two thousand miles of earth and America that she had never seen and that she was seeing now through the brooding eyes of love and sadness and womanly grandeur.

... there were the young wives of with babies in their arms, the young soldier-wives who were beginning to wander the nation, tired and lonely and all wrapped in visions of love and remembrance and desperate devotion, traveling the thousands of night-miles across the continent in search of some pitiable little home or situation that would bring them close to their young husbands, if only for a few months.

In the vividness of the world you have created for me within the 500-odd pages of this book, you have grasped me from the static, somnolent grayness of the bureaucratic routine that I have fallen into, and thrust me back into the world of the living, to return to the things that, after all this time, have been keeping me alive, without my realizing it.

And now I understand why I cause myself to burn, burn, burn, like a roman candle across the night, and why I am mad to live, mad to talk, mad to write, mad to read, desirous of everything, covetous of nothing. This is the only soul I can ever have.

P.S. I thank Mr. T for giving me my first two Jack Kerouac books last Christmas, he, too, who came thundering into my life just as unexpectedly and just as passionately, and who has brought me back to love, faith, and the land of the living.