Comments on: Jack Kerouac, Man Who Got It.

By: jbkuhner

jbkuhner — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:25:32 +0000

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.

By: austik

austik — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 02:22:33 +0000

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.

By: Lynne Thermann

Lynne Thermann — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 22:47:44 +0000

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.

By: jbkuhner

jbkuhner — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:23:19 +0000

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.

By: mattw1

mattw1 — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:44:56 +0000

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.

By: mattw1

mattw1 — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:47:17 +0000

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.