Jack
Kerouac and William James: Give Them the Mad Ones
The long awaited film version of Jack Kerouac's celebrated novel On the Road (1957) is finally hitting
movie screens around the world (and opening in the fall, here in the U.S.) after
premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this past May. Kerouac himself, however,
after 40 years, continues to bewilder his admirers for his rather rapid personal
decline following his literary success, from ardent champion of artistic and
spiritual revelry to prematurely middle-aged sourpuss, dying of alcoholism at
the age of 47 in 1969.
Probably the most quoted passage in Kerouac's depiction of post-war
American youth in kinetic pursuit of heady experience is the narrator's homage
to the impassioned nature of his friends' lives:
"the only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad
to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous
yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars and in the middle
you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes "Awww!"
It may only be a coincidence, but this youthful paean to hyperenthusiasm
associated with Kerouac and several others of the 1950's American "beat" writers
oddly echoes the sentiment of another famous American in his twenties, writing
some 85 years earlier in a different post-(civil)war era.
William James, who established the American philosophical school of
pragmatism upon the value of individual experience, wrote in 1865 (in a letter
to his mother) of his admiration for his intellectual acquaintances in
Cambridge Massachusetts:
"the idea of the people swarming
about as they do at home, killing themselves
with thinking about things that have
no connexion with their merely external
circumstances, studying themselves
into fevers, going mad about religion,
philosophy, love, & sich,
breathing perpetual heated gas & excitement, turning
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