I read On the Road one summer during high school for the same reason I did a lot of things: because the cool kids told me to. I don’t think I understood it; in fact, it sort of gave me a headache.
So I was more than a little surprised by the New York Public Library’s recent exhibit of Jack Kerouac’s life and work. As well as showcasing the original scroll of On the Road, it focused primarily on his spiritual life, which, it turns out, was unbelievably deep. Widely considered a cultural prophet – the quintessential one of the 20th Century, really – he is rarely presented as a religious figure. But that’s precisely the impression one got from the exhibit. Kerouac started out life as a Roman-Catholic, became an Atheist, then a Buddhist, then a Buddhist-Christian, and then, at the end of his life, a straight-up Christian. In fact, of the many drawings of his that were on display, a remarkable number featured Jesus Christus himself. But don’t take my word for it – here are a couple of the journal entries that were on display:
“There is a grave fault in the nature of human life. Somewhere in the soul there is an error in the construction, a dark misgiving intimate and mute that prevents us from being happy when there seems to be no particular unhappiness abroad in our lives. In this dark cave is stored the universal essence of all sufferance.” – 1945
“Nothing else in the world matters but the kindness of Grace, God’s gift to suffering mortals.” – 1961
“Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. I can’t escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.”
Perhaps my personal favorite, from his 1964 poem, The Northport Haiku: “Whatever it is, I quit.”
Finally, his immortal words about the Big Apple:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzCF6hgEfto&w=600]
Great post DZ. I’ve heard your Dad talking about this fellow alot lately… sounds like a great exhibit. I’ll be in D.C. to visit my dad in a few weeks. Maybe I’ll take the train up to NYC to check it out. Thanks for the stuff your layin’ down on here. It’s awesome!
way to drop the haiku bomb!
“In this dark cave is stored the universal essence of all sufferance.”
What a sentence.
I also like his haiku:
I should have
scratched that spot
before I started to sleep.
Wow, was Kerouac really a professing Christian at the end of his life? Didn’t know that.
I went through a big Kerouac phase, even roaming around Lowell and going to his grave. His writing is no longer to my taste for the most part, but I still find him and his spiritual journey enormously sympathetic. Were there no Christian mystics he could have fallen in with at Columbia? I guess Merton was in Kentucky by then. What a shame.
There were no Christian mystics he would have known how to find at Columbia in those days. He was only 19, and dropped out after he lost his football scholarship.
Later Kierkegaard had an impact on him and also some of the more modern French Catholic mystics.
He has recovered his Catholicism by the time he writes (drunk) “Satori in Paris”.
Where you see his ‘late’ religion very vividly is in the many ‘Crucifixions’ he painted towards the end.
Like Andy Warhol a little, Kerouac did not depart from Christian images in his last five years or so.
There’s also the Christian epiphany at the end of “Big Sur”.
In any event, his Catholicism did not help him, or help him enough, with his alcoholism.
That is a fact which has to be faced.
Thanks, Paul. I don’t remember ever reading about those paintings. I may dip into “Big Sur” and “Satori in Paris” again.
Not sure why anyone who has read Kerouac at any depth would be surprised he had a rich spiritual life— it’s pretty much all he talks about. He says in his Paris Review interview that all he writes about is Christ. And there were plenty of Christian mystics at Columbia and many other other places. Even Ginsberg was reading St. John of the Cross at the time. Kerouac admired Merton and was friends with Merton’s fellow mystic and good buddy Robert Lax. That said, I think it’s a stretch to describe Kerouac as a “straight up Christian.” Yes, he did return to his Catholic roots in the end (I would argue he never left them), but he never went to mass or was in any conventional sense a practicing “Christian.” He was a Catholic-Buddhist mystic, or better yet, just a mystic. As he said many times, “I’m just waiting for God to show his face.”