Must a restless soul always be in search of sensation or does sensation simply choose to come by whenever it pleases?
- laleex
photo:sunst0ne
JACK KEROUAC - ON THE ROAD
The selection of 15 favourite Kerouac’s words in his greatest masterpiece and one of my favourite books:
1. And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. (p.13)
2. I didn’t know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and all the sad sunds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. (p.15-16)
3. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream - grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. (p.96)
4. It was dusk. Where was Hassel; he wasn’t there, he was in Riker’s Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? (p.97)
5. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. 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. (p. 112)
6. Ah, but we know time. Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care of itself. (p.144)
7. And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especuially because the transition from life to death and back to life 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. I realized it was because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. (p.157)
8. Yes, it was agreed; we wre going to do everything we’d never done and had been too silly to do in the past.
9. Dust rose to the stars together with every sad music on earth. (p.197)
10. Nothing happened that night; we went to sleep. Everything happened the next day.
11. Now I felt better. I rose to the new complications. (p.204)
12. What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind. (p.233)
13. Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summer night. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same. (p.268)
14. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civbilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way. (p.273)
15. So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (p.281)
“Sometimes Magdalen had boy friends, I didn’t mind and I didn’t enquire. I preferred it when she had, as then I had more time for work, or rather for the sort of dreamy unlucrative reflextion which is what I enjoy more than anything in the world.” — Iris Murdoch, Under The Net p. 10
The Great Gatsby premiere!
Yesterday evening we went toThe Great Gatsby premiere at Kinodvor Ljubljana. I absolutely loved the movie, which was just as dreamy as the book itself. Of course, I also didn’t mind the free Möet Chandon and macarons at the end, oh yeah and cool photobombing caterers.
From one grey city to another.
photo: bienenkiste
LJUBLJANA
(slov.)
Kako lepa je ljubljana maja,
ko zelenje še tako skromne narave
popolnoma zaobjame sivino mesta,
ko se ti sonce tudi če ne sije
popolnoma predaja.
Kako lepa je Ljubljana oktobra,
ko je mesto obdano s plameni
boemsko obarvanih listov,
ki z večerom prehajajo v sij
mestnih luči.
A najlepša je Ljubljana takrat,
ko jo zadnjič gledaš z očmi,
ki vedo, da jo zapuščaš.
LJUBLJANA
(eng.)
How beautiful Ljubljana is in May,
when the greenery of its modest nature
fully embraces the city greyness,
and the sun is completely devout
even when it stays hidden.
How beautiful Ljubljana is in October,
when the city is surrounded with flames
of bohemian coloured leaves transforming
into the evening glow of city lights.
And yet the most beautiful Ljubljana is,
when looking at it with eyes
that know you are saying goodbye.
photo: overdosage
So I just found out I’m moving to Bali for a year. I can’t wait to hang out with these guys!
photo:ryanfkramer
“Sometimes I get it all; the purpose of suffering, the purpose of joy and the purpose of the people around me. All the nature, all the cities, all the thoughts and all the feelings. Yes, all suddenly opens in front of me like a crystal clear stream leading me through the forest. But I cannot tell you about it. You must get there on your own, because once you do, it’s the most wonderful moment in the world. That feeling may last for a while, sometimes even for an hour or two and then it will vanish, leaving you back in the cold world of worries and fears. But that won’t matter anymore, because you’ll know that if you understood it all once, you’ll undersatnd it all again.” — Laleex
Spring Spleen, Lydia Davis
(Source: nevver)
“No, I trust nature! I don’t trust your laws. Your laws have corrupted the whole of humanity. Enough is enough! The time has come when all the old, rotten religions have to be burned completely and a totally new concept of relgiousness has to arise, life-affirmative: a religion of love and not of law, a religion of nature and not of discipline, a religion of totality and not of perfection, a religion of feeling and not of thinking. The heart should become the master, and then things will settle on their own.” — Osho