Jack Kerouac & The Big Sur

The Big Sur has to be one of the most favorite slice of California, from the High Sierra to Death Valley. Why does Big Sur intrigue so many people?... There is the redwood forests and magnificent pristine coastal scenery, but the region has a colorful history. Some of it in books and on film, which make me want to drive there with my hubby like Jack and Lisa did it in August of this year.

                                                                                                          Bixby Creek Bridge  {Photo by Jack Daniel Mahoney}
They told us about the trip and it have me thinking I need to go back and re-read Kerouac's Big Sur, which I first read years ago in a Kerouac frenzy -- On the Road, then The Town and The City, then Big Sur. In Big Sur the "King of the Beatniks" going across the country for one more round with boys and girls before retirement to his study, bottle, and typewriter, and then, in 1969 death. He was forty-seven. The boozing and hangovers and... there is still a core beauty to Kerouac's feel for the life of language:

"Big elbows of Rock rising everywhere, sea caves within them, seas pollocking all around inside them crashing out foams, the boom and pound on the sand, the sand dipping quick (no Malibu Beach here) -- Yet you turn and see the pleasant woods winding upcreek like a picture in Vermont --- But you look up into the sky, bend way back, my God you're standing directly under that aerial bridge with its thin white line running from rock to rock and witless cars racing across it like dreams!"- Jack Kerouac 

Positive affirmation for the day: 

"Above all, he was a tender writer. It would be hard to find a mean-spirited word about anybody in all his writing."-- Aram Saroyan

I think that's very true, what struck me--his compassion allowed him to spin people's motivations into gold. At his darkest times, however, this propensity turned to paranoid delusion--he perceives people's hidden motives to be utterly evil--absurdly and falsely evil.

I mean, come on, even without the alcohol, who hasn't been there--at least for a little while?