I always thought Ray Charles' "Hit The Road, Jake" was for Jack Kerouac.
Hit the road, Jack.
Never look back. Never.
I read "On the Road" when I was a sophomore in high school, because the phrase "The Autobiography of the Soul of the Beat Generation" on the cover of the book aroused my strong interest. To be precise, the thing that attracted me the most was "Beat".
Maybe it was to find spiritual resonance. Anyway, my mental state was broken at the time. I needed to see how others broke down to provide me with some behavioral and spiritual guidelines.
Only later did I understand that the construction of the highway extending in all directions, the first time humans set foot on the moon, the emergence of junk food and large supermarkets, allowed this generation of Americans to drive a broken car across the deserted middle from the east coast. West Coast; they sing to the night sky, thinking about the future; they revel in drugs, alcohol, and sex; they are carefree but can't find a future. This is called the lost generation.
It disappointed me, they didn't break down at all, they were just confused. In the cramped, boring, stressful life of high school, I really broke down. But that unrestrained freedom of the American style attracted me like a magnet.
Dharma Wanderer
So I bought Dharma Wanderer, Lonely Angel, and Big Sur.
The title page of "Dharma Wanderer" reads: Dedicated to Han Shanzi.
Who is Han Shanzi? Sounds like an oriental name.
"He lived in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, but he became a hermit in the mountains. He was the same generation as Li Bai and Du Fu, and was placed among the star-studded poets of the prosperous Tang Dynasty. His poetic skills were not superb, but he could not drown out the brilliance of his personality.. ....In the 1960s, he was named Patriarch in the American hippie movement."
It turned out to be a Tang Dynasty poet. A person who is completely new to me, but who has traveled through the millennium and across the ocean, has been resurrected in the heart of a young American in the 1950s. Fifty years later, Kerouac was resurrected in the drawer of a bespectacled and steel-toothed Chinese student.
On an evening with a math test, she fantasizes about driving a battered used car across California's rolling wasteland to the crumbling coastline.
View more about On the Road reviews
