The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

There’s something about Van Morrison’s voice that makes every molecule in my body cease to vibrate. The moment I hear his unmistakable sound on the radio, everything inside me stops to listen and be, simply be, while the rest of the world whizzes by at light speed. Sometimes his songs bring me joy, sometimes melancholy, and sometimes nothing. But at the end of every song, I feel a sense of peace and completion. I imagine this is what meditation must feel like.

Many of Van Morrison’s songs are not sung at all, but are spoken recitations—poetry with music, I suppose. These are sometimes even more beautiful than the other songs because the rhythms of the words weave themselves so smoothly with Van Morrison’s lyric Irish brogue, in and out of the music.

The first (and only) book by Jack Kerouac I ever read was The Dharma Bums. The opening sentence reads, “Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.” I could very well have been listening to a Van Morrison song. And in that instant, I understood the appeal of the Beat genre.

For me, the appeal of Kerouac was not its ideological content. It was not the expression of freedom from being on the road, from living an alternative lifestyle, or from the mind-bending substances. What I loved about The Dharma Bums were the rhythm and beauty of the prose.

Kerouac’s language is so unrelentingly beautiful that I could open the book to any page and find something lovely to quote. On page 17:

“The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under and meditate on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.”

On page 91:

“And that roaring creek was a beauty by moonlight, those flashes of flying moon water, that snow white foam, those black-as-pitch trees, regular elfin paradises of shadow and moon.”

This rhythmic beauty can literally be found on every page. The last few sentences of the book are my favorite, and the image they conjure has stuck with me through the years. It so perfectly sums up my relationship with the world.

“…as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said “Thank you, shack.” Then I added “Blah,” with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.”

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

tags: books book reviews Van Morrison Jack Kerouac