One could take the modern tradition of writing as accidentally giving birth to study in how to think. Writers came about their craft as a way of explaining consciousness, even if their treatment of it is indirect. How to treat the million questions and choices we have to make, actions, non-actions, that come steadily.

Of course, we will never truly know if anything we do is truly and completely right or wrong. You can't ever relax until you take a moment for yoga, a meditation, to take the time to realize that all the choosy voices are largely worth ignoring, so just be content.

We're complete dignified beings just as we are, and only require the simplest of lives.

Kerouac is full of interesting tensions. No coincidence that someone recreating events of daily life into a literary form should be a student of Buddhist thought. After writing On the Road, he sat down and studied it, as he waited, and waited.

On the one hand, Kerouac realizes that he is no self, just a being of infinite wisdom. He does stand up for the Buddhist point of view is his work. On the other hand, there is the Kerouac who likes to go off on adventure, as if he needed adventure to fuel his prose with tales and characters.

How did he reconcile and balance it all? Did he find a way where it really worked for him? Did he take, as maybe the religious tend to do, too strict a line, that he understood but couldn't adapt to his life? Maybe he could have made some adjustments, adjusting for 'that was then, this is now; buddha is buddha, jack is jack, and it's supposed to be that way.' Maybe he was so invested in writing that had to worry too much about his fate as a writer.

But he had a balance. There'd be an adventure, a story line, and then he could step in and say, but it's not about just that story, here's what it's really about. He did pretty good though, getting through to the reader of the day. And one hopes he knew that his those words, about his fond puzzlement with high thoughts, have a lot of power and still do. He had accomplished something and deserved to rest on his laurels.

Ah well, every writer since Shakespeare and time immemorial has been tortured by the same question, stay in, or go out and maybe see some action.



It's not easy to explain some things, like the void, like illusion of self, that all your senses take to be real is a kind of phantasm. Kerouac goes along his road teaching himself these lessons and their applicability to real life, as if largely to distinguish what is for me as far as the things of the world, and not is not for me, to distinguish useful activities from useless ones. That, we suppose, takes some strength. It takes a lot of hindsight made present, if you will. Your family is a part of you, but a lot of stuff you think you might want, well, maybe not, in fact, no, just an illusion in one's emotional mind to let go of.