All dogs love God. They’re wiser than their masters.
The straight line will take you only to death.
Papier-mache canals flowed in downtown Lowell, men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect the drizzle hopelessness of 1926.
Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I’d crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquites and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, til the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows-and still we rolled.
You know,” I said, “I think it doesn’t make any difference to him anyway. He’s just satisfied to wander around and forget things.
This is the way I like it, when you get going there’s just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy.
I woke up from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where, because I couldn’t see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive on.
Life was life no matter where one lived.
I wished Dean and Carlo were there – then I realized they’d be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The.
With the coming of Dean Moriarity began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.
What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgements and pray for the light.
A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes – the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx.
I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back to New York.
I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.
Late afternoon, it was I not the void that changed.
Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by.
Did they know that he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour... this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?
He was BEAT – the root, the soul of Beatific.
You boys going to get somewhere, or just going.
Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon...