When I was in San Francisco last year, I did what every tourist with the slightest literary pretension does in that town: I stopped by the famed City Lights Bookstore and bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s one of those classics I’ve always heard the cool kids talking about and meant to read myself, but somehow never quite got around to it. Not until last winter, anyhow.

My plan to blog my reactions to the book that defined an influential subculture never quite materialized, naturally, and given how mushy my memory seems to have become lately, I no longer recall many specifics about it. I do remember liking it in general, although Kerouac’s style gave me some problems. The narrative occasionally slips into stream-of-consciousness — never a technique I’ve liked very much — and the beatnik slang peppered throughout is sometimes, well, laughable. (I recognize, of course, that this is an unfortunate result of time, and that when On the Road was originally published in 1957, the language must’ve been fresh and exciting. Sadly, though, it’s been so parodied over the past 50 years that it’s nearly impossible to encounter it today without thinking of silly stereotypes like Maynard G. Krebs — the “G” is for “Walter” — or a hundred cartoons featuring skinny men in black turtlenecks, sunglasses, and berets who snap their fingers a lot.) On the positive side, however, the book has a genuine verisimilitude, and the reader gets the sense of being privileged to experience an unknown subculture through the eyes of an insider, without any filters or censorship. And Kerouac really captures the restless, hungry-to-see-and-do-it-all energy that consumes many (if not all) young people.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I was sifting through a stack of junk on my desk this afternoon, came across my copy of On the Road (which has been sitting there since, oh, February or thereabouts), and saw that it still had all the sticky-tabs I’d placed on passages I found particularly striking. I thought I’d post some of them here, for my own amusement if no one else’s…

First up, a nifty description of San Francisco, a city I frankly adore:

There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the eleven teeming hills.

Here’s one that caught my interest simply because it’s so damn eerie; recall that Kerouac was writing this around 1951, a full half-century before 9/11:

When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.

Prescient? Or have Arabs always had this reputation?

Moving on, here’s a bit from near the end of the book, when the narrator is at last growing up and beginning to acquire some wisdom. I like this one, especially, because it presents an idea I’d never considered before, the way you look at old photos and think you know what the lives of the people within them must’ve been like based upon these frozen instants, but really, that’s just you making unsupported assumptions:

Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.

That passage also nicely articulates, for lack of a better term, the whole “circle of life” thing, the way young people always think that whatever they’re feeling and doing is utterly unique to them, but one day they come to realize their parents were young once, too, and had all the same struggles and emotions, and that their own children are someday going to go through it all as well.

And finally, this longer section is from near the beginning of the book. This bit, more than any other individual passage, captures what I was talking about earlier, the restless, often melancholy longing I remember feeling in my twenties (and still feel, in certain respects and to certain degrees), the need to see the world and do lots of different things, and to have sex and experience love and have deep conversations, and to be disappointed when none of these things manages to quite meet your expectations, and then to hear the call of the road and to set out yet again, hoping the next time might be different…

Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.

 

My moments in Denver were coming to an end. I could feel it when I walked her home, on the way back I stretched out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made me want to get back on that road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer-by for a dime. They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.

I think if I’d read On the Road earlier in my life, it could easily have been one of my personal touchstones, one of those major works that resonates and seems to be about you, man. As it was, coming to it at the somewhat-more settled age of 39, it was merely a good book, one which brought back a lot of memories, not of specific events, necessarily, but of a state of mind. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty difficult job for a writer in itself…