On the Road

I have recently read On the Road and it left an impression on me. It has a high power to transport you to its inside - 1950's Beat America - and therefore creates a complete setting inside your mind, where you are free to wander. 

With any narrative, you will eventually forget the story's flesh, no matter how much its details moved or amused you while reading; the book will only subsist in your spirit when it corresponds to a particular mental landscape. Only then does the book become yours, a mental window into another world you would never get to experience otherwise. Actually, the window analogy is imperfect in this case - the book's impression on the reader depends both on the author's construction and on the reader's effort to connect, which hangs on past experiences, an open mental state and that non-defined constant we call "personality". When this connection is forged, I believe it is lasting: the mere idea of a book can bring you physical and emotional sensations and a specific, though most often not verbalised, intellectual outlook on life.

On the Road. Isn't it an evocative set of words? To me, it now brings: a winding road in the middle of nowhere, the taste of dust and the dry softness it sets on your skin, the thick smell of tar, the exhilaration of movement on, the sense of possibility of looking at the stars when you might just go anywhere, the burning ache to feel everything at once. 

Kerouac's musical prose, filled with a weary but unstoppable enthusiasm for life, echoes the melancholy freedom of jazz music. The way the narrative is built resembles an impressionist painting in its vast, seemingly aimless scope of events and characters that, once you step back one step to look at it, are what gives the image meaning. His writing's brilliance, however, never feels like a prim stylistic touch. It is a genuine expression of a way of life, which is probably why this book is the icon of a particular generation's search for happiness.

Would I live like they did? Were they courageous or senseless? From a rational perspective, one would have to admit their behaviour was reckless and destructive and that they often treated others, particularly women, as objects. But it somehow doesn't see fair to judge the Beats from a fixed rational point of view, which they so strongly rejected. Instead, while reading, I tried to erase myself into the characters, in other words, to feel their experiences and not to analyse them. There's freedom in escaping from yourself as far as possible, which is why books like this one are tools of liberty for people who, on the outside, live quietly.

A film adaptation is coming out later this year. Though I think that the director Walter Salles is perfect for the source material, it would truly be a masterful achievement if he manages to convey that same sense of emotional freedom - sensuous and destructive, appealing and repulsive at the same time -through film.

In the Backseat

I like spending days travelling.

Inside the van, there open up gaps in everyday reality and you get fleeting glimpses at a different life, one in which time is unified and space itself - in the form of a changing landscape, with the light growing and then decaying into milky darkness - flows by you outside. Stories are told, stories big and tragic like the stuff of fiction but taken out of the fabric of reality. Revelations are made without even flinching - there can be no secrets in this movable world. In some intuitive way, we all notice that life is a blink of an eye, and there is an urgency to share all those experiences we feel as uniquely ours, those which we feel contain the core clues to the mystery of our own identity.

The backseat is a parenthesis.

And outside the landscape flows. The most beautiful moments are sunrise and sunset, when it somehow seems that the world might turn out a million different ways. The dawn is grey: before the sun rises, objects seem translucent. Then, colour blooms into the world and fleshes itself out throughout the day, ever-changing. The outside scenery suggests indefinite memories of things that don't belong to you but to the universe of human experience: longing and loss are contained in the van's unstoppable motion forward, a reminder of the constant mutability of our lives.

A sense of possibility, above all, awaits you at the backseat, when you're exhausted and hungry and your body is broken but you carry on speaking and looking people in the eyes as if that was moving the van, and, in that way, moving the whole world.