From Kerouac’s Richmond Hill journals (the area I grew up in Queens):
MONDAY AUG. 23 – Told my mother today she ought to go live down South with the family instead of spending all her time slaving in shoe factories in order to earn just enough money to spend on the system of expenses that is our society. In Russia they slave for the state, here they slave for Expenses. There’s no difference anywhere … people just go rushing off to meaningless jobs day after day, you see them coughing in the subways at dawn, and they never rest, they never relax, they never enjoy life, all they do is ‘Meet Expenses’ – beyond food, they squander their souls on things like ‘rent’, ‘decent clothes’, ‘gas & electricity’, ‘insurance,’ and a million-and-one ‘decent’ appurtenances. Even the birth of a child involves months and months of ‘pay-money.’ Everything ‘costs money’ now. My mother and the whole human race are behaving now like peasants who have just come out of the fields and are just so dreadful tickled because they can buy baubles and doodads in stores. The other night she came home with several dollars worth of junk for Nin’s baby – even the sweet child is measured in ‘hourly wages’ now. The whole system is incredibly – I don’t know what incredibly. Insane! And when I told her these things, you might have thought I was blaspheming God Almighty!
Well, those are my sentiments… As for me, the basis of my life is going to be a farm somewhere where I’ll grow some of my own food, and if need be, all of it. Someday I won’t do nothing but sit under a tree while my crops are growing (after the proper labor, of course) – and drink home-made wine, and write novels to edify my soul, and play with my kids, and relax, and enjoy life, and goof off, and thumb my nose at the coughing wretches. I tell you they deserve nothing but scorn for this. And the next thing you know, of course, they’ll all be marching off to some annihilating war which their vicious leaders will start to keep up appearances (decent honor) and ‘meet expenses.’ After all, what would happen to the precious system-of-expenses if our exports met with Russian competition. Shit on the Russians, shit on the Americans, shit on them all. I’m going to live life my own ‘lazy-no-good’ way, that’s what I’m going to do.
Kerouac got it, and then promptly did nothing about it: he never lived it, he just sat in bars drinking, knowing what he was supposed to do and not doing it. And hence he died miserable – famous and talented and miserable, having drunk himself to death. He never got the farm that would have probably saved him – he never lived out what he instinctually knew was the best life for him. We intend to live it.
Kerouac is one of the great dividing figures in American thought. I was speaking to a very literate friend who hated On the Road - “I just couldn’t help thinking,” she said, “when they had had all these adventures and they were done, what did they have?” That would have been her reaction to watching Kerouac sitting under the tree – “He’s going to have nothing if he keeps on sitting under that tree.” And that’s more or less my precise reaction to people who slave away their entire lives for “expenses” – they do it, day after day, and in the end, what do they have? Different types of people, I suppose, mutually mystified at each other.
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For me, the main difficulty with “buying the farm” is the lack of spontaneous social interaction. The only unannounced visitors you’ll get will be black and furry and will eat out of your garbage.
Just this weekend Paula had a bunch of people over to hang out and draw on the deck. That would no longer happen if we moved.
I’m not sure that’s a big deal for me, and I’m not sure there aren’t other ways of approaching the problem — you go to them, I guess. But people tell me it will bother me and I’m also not sure they’re wrong.
Another thing that troubles me about The Farm. One is removing oneself from the daily lives of others, in order to live more pleasurably. There’s something semi-self-centered about that. Again, I don’t know if that bothers me terribly but it has crossed my mind.
Both of the things you say, Matt, are legitimate sacrifices that are made this way.
And honestly I think you are different and have different requirements from Kerouac or myself. For Kerouac there was almost no social interaction that was not dissipation; he desperately needed to be grounded in something like having to manure the strawberries or prune the apple-trees in order have any discipline in his life. I don’t have very many pleasures in the world and need the pleasures of nature in order to have any happiness at all, especially given how marvellously resistant the women of the world are to my charms. For me there’s never been any doubt. I was wringing my hands reading Wordsworth in high school, burning with the knowledge that every day I spent away from nature was another day wasted. And I love people – and Lord knows I’d love to meet other people for whom nature is as it is for me, a passion and an addiction and a pleasure that I won’t willingly do without – it’s just that I also need nature and beauty and pleasure.
Thanks for posting the piece on Kerouac, John.
Frankly, I don’t believe it’s at all possible to sequester oneself from the daily lives of others, regardless of where we reside. A sense that we’ve abandoned community because we’ve found quietude is strictly illusionary.
Perhaps I’m taking this out of context, but in The Subterraneans Kerouac wrote: I was going down the street and thinking ‘Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.’
The man who wrote this proceeded to drink himself to death in bars? To abuse stimulants to the degree of “intoxicating happiness”? Whoever this man was, he seems to be conflicted, as if the man he expresses that he ought to be and the man he is are in constant conflict.
Austik, he had all the insights it seemed, but managed not to live it. He wanted life to be exciting all the time, and he just couldn’t seem to live with simple boringness. Then he wrote about boringness to make it the final frontier of *real* excitement. But that was self-destructive in the end, I suppose.
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