Reading from Kerouac's letters, as put together by Ann Charters, we get from time to time a sense of the writer asking, what more can I do? "I've been employed, worked all sorts of physical jobs. I wrote when physically not impossible, battling discouragement, a lack of support, and maybe even some sniping from my fellows." What more can you do? You just keep going, and pretend, or just shrug at the great lack of security the future holds. "At least they could publish my book."

Ginsburg, acting as an agent, was often more critical than positive, suggesting to Jack that he make changes, and get rid of some 'bad crazy.' And so, On the Road, and all its related manuscripts, edited versions, etc., just sat around, and Kerouac despaired. He goes back to Rocky Mount, to his sister's house, takes a job in a textile factory. And this is after much toil, and hard railroad work, travels, times starving, all sorts of stuff. Rites of passage, he had them. More than we would know.

But there you are, suppose, in that moment, in that sentiment, where you just keep going, even though you are 35 and nobody and maybe even a family joke. That must be, is, when you reach a confirmation, a belief in the great artistic instincts within. Then you see, maybe, how perfect your book is. It is perfect at being what it is, and no one can criticize it. Kerouac was perfect at doing what he was doing. It hadn't been done before.

Whether or not he was right or wrong--eternity and the divine, quite beyond us, to know the difference and be the judge--there is great power to his work, an achievement, a spiritual accomplishment, flawed as it may be. And that is hard for a mortal to do.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Kerouac seems predisposed to understand Buddhism on so many levels. In the public library in San Jose, he found what he was looking for in Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible. He was studious about it.

Visions, he had. It's happy news he brought, though tinged with a certain sadness, one that's okay to feel, that doesn't cause you to be carried away. "Go moan for man," he wrote, or rather heard from a passing hobo of some sort. Like Buddhism, happy news though it is, it doesn't seem like a sure thing that people would want to know this sort of stuff about themselves. Maybe to extents and degrees, some of it can be accepted, some of how gentle they are by nature, how passive one must be. But yes, not much of it makes any sense. And the skeptical will remain so, saying, 'why should I believe someone with a vision?' Why should I buy the many preoccupations that On the Road offers a reader? 'Why should I get caught up with this "I think of Dean Moriarty" crap?'

Later on, of course, compliments are paid. The work is understood. But in the meantime, it must have looked like, as life is, a huge lack of security to everything. As life had been for him in many ways all along.

On the Road is not just a book, in the sense of a book being an account. It goes forward with producing a vision, just as it departs from the tradition of the European novel. Not just a novel, but from real life, and on the verge of being a political statement, as if it had lingered long in the background of the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, waiting to come out, saying something akin to 'all men are created equal.' Most novels really don't have vision, except here and there, hidden, subtle.