Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Odyssey (Continued)

A series of short uneventful rides, and I find myself standing by the side of the road just over the Connecticut border. I am shaded by a natural wall which has been cut to make way for the road. Across the street are grass and trees, and up to the right, a nice little house. The sky is very blue.

It is so nice here that I feel like staying here forever, or at least for the night. But I must carry on in order to get home. Home spells comfort and security. This place spells poetry, ants in your clothes, and hunger.

To be exact about this writing game, now, let’s face it: A writer wants to cut a slab out of the whole conglomerate mass-symphony of nature and life and present it to his readers. Why? Because, Art is a readjustment of perception, from physical actuality to a perception expressed by the artist. This trip of mine occurred during the vast ant-rush of that day in May; it was a sequence, and ran from New York to Lowell, and took 12 hours. But now I am presenting it to my readers in the form of Art, so that their cognizance of this sequence is readjusted from reality to art. Why does the human being insist on presenting reality through an artistic and expressive medium? Why doesn’t he let well enough alone? Why should he express Life, through Art? Since the cavemen did it themselves, carving crude images of animals on stone, I am concluding that man is making an attempt to intensify consciousness, which is a very religious thing to do. Art, therefore, is in one measure religion. That may be why the Catholics like to call Art the language of God, or the such. But I say that Man, seeing Life about him, desires to express himself about this phenomena, and in so doing, exercises what is probably the only differentiating faculty between human and brute: That of Art, the act of readjusting perception, from reality to a new objectification and revaluation, thus exhibiting a religious desire to worship what we have about us, which is Life.

This settled, the writer now sets forth to document reality.

Well, I got a ride from a man who loved books and music. He recited William Cullen Bryant and praised Sir Walter Scott and Stevenson and Reid. He drove slowly and talked about himself. It was amazing, riding in a sleek car with a tender soul who loved the romance of Scott through streets strewn with realism—filling stations, stores, hydrants, straw hats, window fronts, no sign of Ivanhoe nor Rebecca.

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