the dharma blog

I just came across this quote. It was a favorite of mine a few years ago, hanging in my apartment and used at the beginning of the first of my three attempts at a novel (the first two attempts failed, we’ll have to see about the third). I’m an introvert for the most part, but the kind of life and energy Kerouac conveys here has always stricken a chord somewhere inside me…

“The happiest days of my life, I can tell you, were spent living with her (Edie Parker) at Columbia when all the kids were around, including Lucien. You’d wake up in the morning and find the house full of people talking or reading books, and you’d go to bed at night with most of them still there and getting ready to curl up on couches and pillows on the floor. What the hell, I don’t know, but to me a home in the suburbs is a sort of isolated hell where nothing happens. I like to open my doors to the “foaming winter” and to lots of people and let them troop through my house. You may never see them again, I think, and I like people anyway. If I had a million bucks, I’d have a mansion, with thirty rooms and the house would be full of my friends all day long, with concerts going on in the record room and bats going on in the wine cellars. I am not inclined to what one might term the Bourgeois way of life.”

~ Jack Kerouac, from letter to Caroline Blake, published in Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940 - 1956, Viking Penguin, 1995.