Windblown World.

I do really enjoy Kerouac's journals though. I read bits and pieces from this compilation called Windblown World for a report a couple years ago, and I keep meaning to pick up a copy so I can read the rest. This was part of one of his entries, and I adore it:

If all our greatest writers had been men who were constitutionally unhappy and constitutionally defeated in the world, we would have reason to despair of all knowledge and imagination, or if not that, despair of the utter lack of responsibility in imaginative talented men. But there are great writers who were true men in every sense -- Mark Twain is one. An uncomplaining man, a man who did not believe that literature is a constant tale of sorrow and nothing else. What does the gloomy sophomore write in his melodramatic tragedy? -- certainly not the whole truth. Mark Twain piloted steamboats, dug for silver in Nevada, roamed the West, 'roughed it', told jokes with other men, hunted, worked as foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, lecturer, and was a family man -- and yet, he did not have to sacrifice all that to his 'art,' he lived and wrote, he was a full man and a full artist, equally happy and whole as unhappy and unwhole, equally gregarious as he was lonely, equally, healthily, simply all things, and I believe he asked that his work not be compared to 'literature as it is known' because he wasn't doing 'that kind of thing at all.' He was just writing, not what he thought 'literature' demanded of him... Let's have another man who lives his life in the world, complete, and also writes great books.

It's easy to look at someone in retrospect like that, and idealize his life. I'm sure Twain wasn't as content with that constant struggle between being whole and unwhole, as Kerouac makes him seem. That's the thing though: it's such a terribly wonderful balancing act. Here's from another entry, which I also enjoy immensely:

The flesh has ceased to mean anything to me. What does it matter whether I gain the meager satisfactions of the penis or not? What has that foul, insuitable, lame worm to do with me? – even if it fills at the sight of a thigh? So no? The sun goes up, the sun goes down – so? The sea is golden; does that make me golden? does that make me salt
What’s me? Me is that which want to be amazed without natural cessation, in an eternity of ecstacy.
Rules? Laws? To me, what?
I am free to want what I want.
I want uninterrupted rapture. I believe this has been made manifest to me in dreams, and in music, and in the pages of Dostoevsky, in the lines of Shakespeare, in sexual joy, in drunkenness, in being high on tea. Why should I compromise with anything else or with the “Bourgeois” calm of the backyard lawn, The Edgar Guest concession wild, wild happiness.
On tea I have seen the light. In my youth I saw the light. In my childhood I bathed in the hints of light; I hankered, eager.
I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else? After all, I’m no cabbage, no carrot, no stem! a burning eye! a mind of fire! a broken goldenrod! a man! a woman! a SOUL!
Fuck the rest, I say, and PROCEED!
(This is what I want to write, not stylistic crap!)

Some of his phrases are just so perfect, I can't even stand it. The way that only a handful of commonplace words just seem to belong to each other, it's like they burst from some secreted, unreal place, and just flowed forward and came out together. And the imagery is so vivid, I can see this whole flash of color and light and darkness when I read these simple combinations of words, and it takes my breath away. That sounds so ridiculous, but it's true. It's exhilarating. I love it. It's so...raw. Perfect.

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