Jack kerouac

The majority of us who aren’t touched by genius come to terms with our mediocrity in late adolescence, once our dreams of sports superstardom are dashed or that bumbling first attempt at a novel sets us straight. You won’t be the next Jordan or Hemingway, after all. Getting over the initial shock of one’s dreams being dashed without suffering some kind of crack-up is the mark of high character and perhaps the first sign a man will settle solemnly — but not joylessly — for a well-adjusted life of invisible, middling victories. The best-adjusted man will embrace the comfort of mediocrity and live vicariously through the great men he admires, which is to say that he’ll become a fan.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the last pages of Naked Lunch at dawn looking for an angry fix of good literature, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection between plot and prose, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up reading Kaddish, who bared their brains to the delights of On the Road in the pursuit of just a fraction of the “angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.” Everyone knows the Beats: from Jack Kerouac to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, their influence has been undeniable, if not always delightful. And on March 12, their lodestar, Jack Kerouac would have been 100 years old.