Hit The Road, Jack

3000 Miles to Find Yourself

I first read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road this summer on something of a whim. On a pretty regular basis I would find myself wandering the aisles of my local Barnes and Noble in search of yet another “chick lit” summer novel. On this particular occasion, I happened to pick up On The Road and I bought it for rather self-serving purposes. The media, many times in fact, had told me that On The Road was an essential read for anyone worth their weight in Pop Culture. The allusions to On The Road in literature, films, and television are simply too numerous to name, and I felt compelled to read it if I were ever to be considered one of the intellectual elite. After reading the book, I feel that Mr. Kerouac would have greatly disapproved of my superficial motivations for reading his work; to him, life was about living in the moment, not doing things for future rewards or societal recognition. Indeed, Kerouac rarely thought more than a few hours ahead. Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s literary alter ego, longs to live a spontaneous life free of responsibilities, so he ventures into the world without a plan to do just that.

Sal avoids growing up and taking on responsibilities by running away. As a recent college graduate, his fear of the future is one shared by twenty-somethings everywhere. The percentage of these young people who literally run away from their newfound responsibilities is very small, and in the 1940’s I’m willing to bet it was even less. But I suppose that being radical is what one must do when defining a new generation. The Beat Generation was similar to the Lost Generation in that they were both groups of post-war youths looking for a way to go on living after meaning had disappeared. They wanted to redefine what it meant to live a happy life and challenge the meaning of “normal”. Beatniks adventured without purpose and travelled without destination.

The travel in which they partook was both physical and spiritual. Some, like Kerouac, actually took pilgrimages across the country to such Beat meccas as San Francisco and New York, but most simply travelled within their own bodies. Experimenting by pushing limits, they tried out new spiritual ideas, sexual practices, and pharmaceutical usages. No limit was left on stretched. Sal Paradise threw everything he had ever known away in order to explore a world about which he knew so little. The Beats founded a new way of living that cared less about the places you’d been physically, and more about where you’d been emotionally.