I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.
In fact it didn’t make a goddamn much of a difference to him. “I’m neutral,” said he, laughing happily with a kind of an eager slaking leer, and Japhy yelled: “Neutral is what Buddhism is!
And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially.
Quando lo trovai a Mill City quella mattina era piombato in uno di quei periodi depressi e infernali che arrivano ai giovanotti sui venticinque.
Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate. What do you think about death, Ray?
As I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer.
Only sign we have now to know which way we’re going, is ducks.
The prettiest girls live in Des Moines.
The secret of this kind of climbing,” said Japhy, “is like Zen. Don’t think. Just dance along. It’s the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen.” Which it was. We didn’t talk much now.
They came to be starlets; they ended up in Drive-Ins.
In that moment, too, he looked so exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt-some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain-that I drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement.
Now he’d bought a new suit to go back in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all – eleven dollars on Third Avenue, with a watch and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to start writing in a Denver rooming house as soon as he got a job there.
No difference between the Morley of this morning and the Morley of last night, except his voice as he rattled on yakking in that cultured snide funny way of his was sorta cute with that morning freshness, like the way people’s voices sound after getting up early in the morning, something faintly wistful and hoarse and eager in it, ready for a new day.
Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!
He is the antithesis of Voltaire, the child of Leibniz.
I don’t know, I’m going as fast as I can and I don’t think I have the time.
I’ve just figured out she is thirty-one-and-a-quarter-per-cent English, twenty-seven-and-a-half-per-cent Irish, twenty-five-per-cent German, eighty-and-three-quarters-per-cent Dutch, seven-and-a-half-per-cent Scotch, one-hundred-per-cent wonderful.
Man ain’t safe going around this country anymore without a gun.
There he was, my chipmunk, in the bright clear windy sunny air staring on the rock; hands clasping he sat up straight, some little oat between his paws; he nibbled, he darted away, the little nutty lord of all he surveyed.
It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.” That’s what Dean was, the Holy Goof.
The whole purpose of mountain-climbing to me isn’t just to show off you can get to the top, it’s getting out to this wild country.