On The Road

I'm making another attempt at using books on tape to make my commute more worthwhile. I've listened to foreign language tapes, and the last book I listened to was The Book of Mormon, in late 2005 when then-President Hinckley asked Church members to read it before the end of the year. For some reason, it seemed substantially less believable as the spoken--as opposed to written--word.

Anyway, since most of the books on my "To Read" list are contemporary nonfiction, of which the local library doesn't have an abundance, I perused the fiction section and picked out the first thing that caught my eye, which was On The Road. I've never read any Kerouac, so I was curious, and have enjoyed it thus far.

In the face of centuries (millennia, rather) of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I somehow maintain this notion that recreational sex didn't really start until the '60s or so. For example, when I read that Alfred Hitchcock ironically called my pristine glamour goddess Grace Kelly "The Ice Queen" because "she slept with almost everybody while filming Dial M for Murder," or that her High Noon co-star Gary Cooper said, "She looked like she was a cold dish with a man until you got her pants down, then she’d explode,” it still strikes me as incongruous with the pre-hippie era. So to observe the relentless emphasis that the men of On The Road place on casually and serially "making" girls, is still an odd revelation. Almost like I'm being let in on some dirty little secret about Father Knows Best. And I was washed in a wave of nostalgia when the plot's itinerary turned to Central City, Colorado, an old mining town in the mountains above Denver, where I spent an adventurous and invigorating summer. A summer, yes, that involved several women. Not all of them physically. But a summer I'll remember, and probably wistfully, for a long, long time.

But of all of the book's attractions and encounters, this one has resonated most profoundly:

I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the L.A. bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight. She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in. Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and black; and her eyes were great big blue things with a soul in it. I wished I was on the same bus with her. A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours. The announcer called the L.A. bus. I picked up my bag and got on it; and who should be sitting alone in it, but the Mexican girl. I sat right opposite her and began scheming right off. I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so quivering, so broken, so beat---all of it had been too much for me---that I got up my courage, the courage necessary to approach a strange girl, and acted. Even then I spent five minutes beating my things in the dark as the bus rolled. "You gotta, you gotta or you'll die! Damn fool talk to her! What's wrong with you? Aren't you tired of yourself by now?"

I know, and have lived, almost verbatim, every conflicted impulse he's describing. I recognize that it is not, despite what Kerouac's autobiographic protagonist calls it, "love." But rather, it's the lust-informed twitterpation of hope, of possibility, of knowing the unknown...and I, well, love it. Or at least feel vivified by it like I do by almost nothing else. Will I ever feel it again for my wife? Will I ever feel it again, period?

Speaking of autobiographies, during lunch today I was perusing the posthumous biography of prominent Utahan Larry H. Miller, among whose favorite quotes, attributed to Ezra Benson, was, “When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with power.” To hear obedience described as an "irritant" came almost as a relief: So I'm not the only one who's thought that! And the idea of an endowment of divine power couldn't seem more distant and foreign.

Speaking of quotes, on the drive home this evening, I heard on the radio someone quoted as saying something to the effect of, "The world will only be righted when men fall at women's feet and beg forgiveness."