A personal essay assignment inspired some reflection this past spring break as I decided my role as a traveler would make for an interesting narrative and expression. Understandably, on my way to the East Coast to visit colleges, I packed my copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to read on the airplane. It is an intriguing autobiographical treatise on the Beat Generation and an account of the epiphanies brought on by travel. However, despite Kerouac’s exuberance about America’s unique landscapes while crossing from the East to the West, there is a sense of coming of age and learning hard lessons. Sal Paradise’s hero, Dean Moriarty, becomes nothing more than a directionless, though somewhat endearing wanderer and, for a while, Paradise becomes disenchanted with the myth and legend of America as a promised land. Yet at the end, after reflection on life and humanity, Paradise admits that Moriarty is his figurehead of American life.
I, personally, love Kerouac’s works, all memoirs and documentations of his life and travel, but On the Road is by far my favorite. More than its spawning of a culture of coffee shop poetry and flannel button-downs, the novel raises questions about home and frontiers. Are they truly a cold people who move from place to place looking neither forward nor backward, or are they simply enviably free? Kerouac does not seem to answer this question through Dean Moriarty. Similarly, Truman Capote, who famously quipped “That’s not writing; that’s typing” about Kerouac’s novel, creates a flighty heroine who is a citizen of everywhere and nowhere in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly is the epitome of the lively yet sorrowful girl who has no sense of belonging yet yearns for a place that feels like home.
This sense of rootlessness pervades our society today. A myth has been created about the beautiful wanderer, the enigmatic, restless youth who never seems to stay too long in one place. We see these delightfully lost souls in 500 Days of Summer and Looking for Alaska and Up in the Air. We move quickly because it’s so much easier to leave and create something new someplace else than to get attached to something that’s sort of beautiful and have to mourn for it when it all falls apart. Elsewhere holds the promise of something better and, in that way, is always attractive. Who wants to spend forever in one place? I want to move, I want to live, I want to learn. Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling, and you won’t find it sitting in one place for the rest of your life. So go, take yourself where life leads you. You probably won’t be disappointed.
À bientôt
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