Back to Kerouac

Trip is winding down. We are in Pittsburgh, dealing with some tough family situations. Pittsburgh, again, is a good town. We are hanging out in my brother's back yard.Summer rain in Pittsburgh is very nostalgic, and very soothing. Cardinals are singing their little hearts out- "Birdie! Birdie! Birdie!" Kate is reading a book about peace activists during WW1. I am coming to the end of Carlos Fuentes A CHANGE OF SKIN, a strange and very powerful novel, maybe a touch too long. We have kayaked on the Allegheny River, visited the town of Emsworth where I grew up, joined my great niece and nephew and their parents at the Aviary, Children's Museum, etc. Nice trip, again, with some tough situations. Tomorrow my sister in law will drive us to her daughter's house in Mt. Lebanon, Kristen will take us to a hotel near the airport and we will fly home on Tuesday I started out writing about ON THE ROAD, which I finished some time ago. Again, quite a book. A movie version will be released in the US soon, it has already appeared in Europe. Kerouac was, I think, a misunderstood writer. His focus really isn't on carousing and wild sex so much as for a search for a deeper sense of life and meaning for it all. Travel, again, was a search for epiphanies, something to root him. He found it all to be transitory, in a Buddhist sense, but his awareness of this helped him appreciate the AHA! experiences when they occurred, and the melancholy aspects of their fleeting nature. His descriptions of people and places were fabulous when his character Sal Paradise traveled alone. When he traveled with Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy), their pace was frantic - Dean moved too quickly to focus on anything outside of his own desperation. These sections are also fascinating, in a very sad way. But it raises the question, what is travel for? Kicks? Rushes? Epiphanies? I'd say no. The real reason for it is to experience the unfamiliar, both with people and in natural settings. Kate and I like to place ourselves in situations where we compare ourselves and our lives to other peoples', or to compare different ecosystems with ours. Hopefully these experiences broaden us, help us take a range of perspectives on life, and see the world as much huger than our day to day realities. There are epiphanies, to be sure, but sometimes the drudgery is just as important... everything fits together. I hope I have expressed this. This is it from the road, I will probably make connecting comments from Oakland.