On The Road is one of my favourite books of all time. It’s influenced my travels and shown me how good writing can be. Now it’s being made into a movie.
It’s always risky making a film version of a classic.
But I think I might just like this one. Not only because I was at junior school with the lead actor, but because the trailer (below) includes what is possibly my favourite paragraph in any book I’mve read…
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh…”
If this appeals you might like this blog post – 11 Travel Books for Bums
Yes, it does appeal 🙂
“11 Travel Books for Bums” Looks like a bad link
fixed the link.
thanks
Kerouac was a massive influence on my desire to travel in my teens. Christopher Isherwood’s ‘Berlin’ books and Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ also played their part.
Hi Al,
I was going to comment on your post recommending “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac, less known but, in my opinion, more powerful than his other works.
I clicked on your link of book recommendations, though, and saw that you had already written about it. That book has been defining for me, and I hope that my later actions in life reflect that.
You posted the excerpt from On the Road so I thought it would be apt for me to post my favorite bit from Dharma Bums that I really feels exhibits the sense of adventure that so many of us strive for:
“Suddenly I felt so free I began to walk on the wrong side of the road and sticking out my thumb from that side, hiking like a Chinese Saint to Nowhere for no reason, going to my mountain to rejoice. Poor little angel world! I suddenly didn’t care any more, I’d walk all the way. But just because I was dancing along on the wrong side of the road and I didn’t care, anybody began to pick me up immediately, a goldminer with a small caterpillar up front being hauled by his son, and we had a long talk about the woods, the Siskiyou Mountains ) through which we were driving, toward Grants Pass Oregon), and how to make good baked fish, he said, just by lighting a fire in the clean yellow sand by a creek and then burying the fish in the hot sand after you’ve scraped away the fire and just leaving it in there a few hours then taking it out and cleaning it of sand. He was very interested in my rucksack and my plans.”
I just think that is beautiful. In doing something so spontaneous, so sudden, for the sole purpose of “for no reason”, a true adventure is had. Talking about cooking fish in sand isn’t important, they could have been talking about the latest football match or how the weather’s been shaping up. What is important is the true passion, the true sense of adventure, that I think we all should try to emulate.
Wonderful quote Warren, thanks : )
Hi Warren,
Dharma Bums is great!
Here’s a couple of quotes I enjoyed from it:
· Rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. “All these people,” said Japhy, “they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it’s all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.”
· Suddenly I was exhilarated to realise I was completely alone and safe and nobody was going to wake me up all night long. What an amazing revelation! And I had everything I needed right on my back. I’d put fresh bus-station water in my bottle before leaving.
· I spread my bag out under a pine in a dense thicket across the road from cute suburban cottages that couldn’t see me and wouldn’t see me because they were all looking at television anyway.
I think Desolation Angels is my fave. Will look forward to this film, though.
I’d have to agree with those above saying that ‘Dharma Bums’ is a much better book to appeal to the travelling nomad. The long section during the trip to the mountains was one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read (although semi-fictional I believe).