So I just finished listening to the audiobook of Big Sur. Wunderbar! Superb. Like it even, dare I say, better than On The Road, which I read just about a year ago this month. I can't recall at the moment the specifics of the audio version at the moment, consider them *to be added at a later date*, because I liked it and feel that it should be mentioned. I dug this book I think more than On The Road I think because I like the vulnerability expressed in it. Weakness and strength, and death and life. He really gets into I think what it means to be alive, I guess, that it always requires your participation if you want it to truely be your own, though it nevertheless happens and this is out of your control. Jack slips into an alcoholic haze of inner chaos, beginning at Big Sur on the beach in the dark and ending at Big Sur in the daylight. He is tortured by the necessity of death, which is something that I appriceated because I often feel the same, in the way he describes it, about the inevitable tragedy of everything in the end. Like, for example, his sorrow over his cat (something I went through after a I misinterpreted a photo that was sent to me in 2005 from home when I was in Denmark, when I thought my little Nicky was gone forever and I couldn't be there to say goodbye. (I was wrong then, but alas, Nicky died the summer I returned home from Europe anyways.) The pain he feels when he sees death is the same that I feel when I see a little squirrel on the side of the road, a victim of mismanaged nature, or when my cat Lilu brings in mice from around the neighborhood and leaves them on the porch to spend their last moments. This, of course, is the most natural of things, but it still saddens me and is one of the many reasons I am a vegitarian. Beyond that I feel that he successfully captures the reality of withdrawl. Of the madness of it. There are things you can take for pain, but the madness can't be avoided. And it is maddening indeed. Where On The Road is the classic Kerouac style beat-adventure, Big Sur pulls back the curtain to reveal the absolut un-glamour of the beat lifestyle, reveals a kind of tragic maturity or wisdom, that however fascinating and beautiful the human condition is in all of it's romance and tragedy and comedy, just the fact that is IS beautiful doesn't mean that is is easy, and the sweetness of death or of pain or of anything utterly thought to be scary and bad does not compare to the sweetness of a sun-ripened peach or a can of soda, but is more the aweful sweetness of that moment of clarity where you finally understand what you've been doing wrong, for example, or of a lesson learned. I guess that still doesn't explain it really, but if you understand it then you understand it and if you don't then you will eventually, when it happens to you. The sweetness of somehing sucking so hard but you still get through it anyways and you can never get rid of it. Okay I will stop now, can you tell I have nothing else to do at the moment? So I guess what I was trying to say is that the book os good. And you should read it. Period.
So I just finished listening to the audiobook of Big Sur. Wunderbar! Superb. Like it even, dare I say, better than On The Road, which I read just about a year ago this month. I can't recall at the moment the specifics of the audio version at the moment, consider them *to be added at a later date*, because I liked it and feel that it should be mentioned. I dug this book I think more than On The Road I think because I like the vulnerability expressed in it. Weakness and strength, and death and life. He really gets into I think what it means to be alive, I guess, that it always requires your participation if you want it to truely be your own, though it nevertheless happens and this is out of your control. Jack slips into an alcoholic haze of inner chaos, beginning at Big Sur on the beach in the dark and ending at Big Sur in the daylight. He is tortured by the necessity of death, which is something that I appriceated because I often feel the same, in the way he describes it, about the inevitable tragedy of everything in the end. Like, for example, his sorrow over his cat (something I went through after a I misinterpreted a photo that was sent to me in 2005 from home when I was in Denmark, when I thought my little Nicky was gone forever and I couldn't be there to say goodbye. (I was wrong then, but alas, Nicky died the summer I returned home from Europe anyways.) The pain he feels when he sees death is the same that I feel when I see a little squirrel on the side of the road, a victim of mismanaged nature, or when my cat Lilu brings in mice from around the neighborhood and leaves them on the porch to spend their last moments. This, of course, is the most natural of things, but it still saddens me and is one of the many reasons I am a vegitarian. Beyond that I feel that he successfully captures the reality of withdrawl. Of the madness of it. There are things you can take for pain, but the madness can't be avoided. And it is maddening indeed. Where On The Road is the classic Kerouac style beat-adventure, Big Sur pulls back the curtain to reveal the absolut un-glamour of the beat lifestyle, reveals a kind of tragic maturity or wisdom, that however fascinating and beautiful the human condition is in all of it's romance and tragedy and comedy, just the fact that is IS beautiful doesn't mean that is is easy, and the sweetness of death or of pain or of anything utterly thought to be scary and bad does not compare to the sweetness of a sun-ripened peach or a can of soda, but is more the aweful sweetness of that moment of clarity where you finally understand what you've been doing wrong, for example, or of a lesson learned. I guess that still doesn't explain it really, but if you understand it then you understand it and if you don't then you will eventually, when it happens to you. The sweetness of somehing sucking so hard but you still get through it anyways and you can never get rid of it. Okay I will stop now, can you tell I have nothing else to do at the moment? So I guess what I was trying to say is that the book os good. And you should read it. Period.
