Just finished On the Road not to long ago and making me lusty for the open terrain:
“I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d down as in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded-at least that is what I thought then.”
“I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets gd-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.
“Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?”
“Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Cassanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops- a lemon lop, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?”
