Blog 2 Christian

Blog 2
Quotes
"The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death."
-Through out the book Kerouac dabbles in philosophy. This is an extremely hard idea to swallow since mostly we think of humanity as constantly fighting its own mortality. Still it makes sense in its own way and shows the endless plight of humanity constantly in inner turmoil until death finally takes us in with open arms.

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
-This very much embodies a reoccurring theme of the book. The whole time Sal seems to be looking for some thing. He seems to be possessed with a constant need to move to explore, as if he is uncomfortable staying in one place. This could be related to the fact that Sal is a veteran and many veterans have trouble reestablishing their life's after months of constant moment and assignment.

"I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it."
- Once again we see Kerouac's morbid curiosity with death. Here he dabbles with Buddhist principles, toying with the idea of reincarnation. He continues to find a way to explain the world and his life.

"It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time."
-This quote branches off from the philosophical ideas presented early. This is instead a good example of his writing style. He has no fear of making up words that do describe perfectly the feeling he is trying to capture. He never uses metaphors or similes that would be expected them but they are all beautiful and perfectly represent the emotion behind them.

Blog 4 Christian

Blog 4
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11709924
This article details how the book On The Road came to be. It has an almost mythical origin with a story that depicts Jack Kerouac going through a sort of writing frenzy that lasted three weeks and ended in On The Road. This is not the complete truth at all though. While the initial manmuscript may have been written in a mere day this does not change the fact that he spent years revising it. This is incosiquential really though because all authors spend a chunk of their time editing thier book. The amazing part is the struggles that Jack went through to publish his book. It was sent to lawyers who did even more nitpicking removing some of the more powerful lines and forcing Jack to change the names of the really people he had written about, for example Allen Ginsberg became Carlo Marx. Despite all this the book was published and has no risen to an almost holy position in the literary community.