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.