Jack Kerouac (1922-69) | 2 Scripts

Train

From October in the Railrod Earth, 1952

Since the days of the Central Pacific, Californians have always had a love-hate relationship with the railroads. So did beat writer Jack Kerouac. In 1952 he made his living as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific, but something about those "merciless wheels" telegraphed dread to Kerouac's inner ear.

Terrified of injury on the job, Kerouac sought escape working on his "spontaneous prose," including a piece called "October in the Railroad Earth," a prose poem of his working life that duplicated railroad rhythms.

So it's peaceful Sunday morning in California and off we go, tack-a-tick, lao-tichi-couch, out of the Bay Shore yards, pause momentarily at the main line for the green, ole 71 or ole whatever been by and now we get out and go swamming up the tree valleys and town vale hollows and main street crossing parking-lot last-night attendant plots and Stanford lots of the world-to our destination in the Poo which I can see, and, so to while the time I'm up in the cupolo and with my newspaper dig the latest news on the front page and also consider and make notations of the money I spent already for this day Sunday absolutely not jot spent a nothing--California rushes by and with sad eyes we watch it reel the whole bay and the discourse falling off to gradual gils that ease and graduate to Santa Clara Valley then and the fig and behind is the fog immemoriates while the mist closes and we come running out to the bright sun of the Sabbath Californiay. . . .

Jack Kerouac captured the restlessness and alienation many of his generation felt in post-war America. Books like On the Road and Dharma Bums continue to appeal to readers who share those feelings in our own time.

The Present Moment

From Big Sur, 1962

California's rugged and beautiful central coast boasts countless unforgettable features, but perhaps one of its most appealing is its isolation.

Jack Kerouac deeply felt that isolation and captured it in Big Sur, here in a passage that turns solitude into a meditation on the joys of the here and now.

There's the present moment fraught with tangled woods—There's the bird suddenly quiet on his branch while his wife glances at him—There's the grace of an axe handle as good as an Eglevsky ballet—There's "Mien Mo Mountain" in the fog illumined August moon mist among other heights gorgeous and misty rising in dimmer tiers somehow rosy in the night like the classic silk paintings of China and Japan—. . . There's the laughter of the loon in the shadow of the moon—There's an owl hooting in the weird Bodhidharma trees—There's flowers and redwood logs—There's the simple woodfire and the careful yet absent-minded feeding of it which is an activity that like all activities is no activity . . . yet it is a meditation in itself especially because all woodfires, like snowflakes, are different every time . . .

Jack Kerouac's Big Sur appeared in 1962, a chapter, wrote Kerouac, of one vast book he thought of as "The Duluoz Legend."