The dark nights of the soul...

That's how Kerouac takes it, that's his path, that's how, that's where he starts.

"Anyway, I wrote the book because we are all going to die...  In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world of sweet attention, but now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed alone bed is stupid, with just this one pride and consolation, my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord.  I made a supplication in this dream.   So in the last page of On The Road, I describe how the hero Dean Moriarty has come to see me all the way from the West Coast just for a day or two, we'd just been back and forth across the country several times, in cars, and now our adventures are over, we're still great friends but we have to go into later phases of our lives, so there he goes, Dean Moriarty, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walking off alone, and last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street, ahead, and bent to it again.  Gone.  So, in America, when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old broken-down old river pier watching the long long skies over New Jersey. and since all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now that children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars will be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear...  The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in, nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.  I think of Dean Moratory, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found.  I think of Dean Moriarty.  I think of Dean Moriarty."