On the Road...

...so I am on the road again. And maybe we are all on the road all the time even if we don't know it... Now, last year I bought a copy of this wonderful book which is On the Road and it was the copy published for the 50th anniversary of the book and I was very happy, for various reasons very happy to buy that book that day which was a beautiful day. This blog is about traveling - so that book it's sort of its bible. But more than traveling in a physical sense, here is the matter of traveling through life, searching for a meaning, and take life in your hands, whatever it means for you, and live it your way. Not to follow the rules. Not to do what you are expected to do. To do what you feel. With all the mistakes and surprises and delusions and with all the impossibilities - because even if you run fast you never get too far from yourself.

There is this expression that Dean Moriarty uses quite often in the book when he sees someone he likes: "he knows time!". I liked that expression but I was just following my instinct, because I couldn't fully understand the literal meaning of it. I got a better explanation from Peter Miller,  who was an English major in college and then went to Harvard and now has a beautiful architectural bookstore in Seattle. Here is what he says:

"Dean Moriarty was Neal Cassidy, an aquarius it turns out, and constant talker and later prankster with Kesey, but always in motion, always, and the praise he knows time is the beat way of crediting someone with having stretched and tormented and stoned themselves into a zen enough position to, finally, never be able to be middle class or settled, strung out to time strung out, enlightened in an exhausted, constant motion way, best achieved by never sleeping, talking a few drugs, staying out, and never getting married, never holding a regular job, nothing square, a kind of hobo as metaphysic king, and the coincidence to music is that the jazz musicians were the only ones who could stay afloat in this limbo and make a day of it. Hemingway had a phrase, the true gen, meaning the actual, the genuine, and knowing time was a prasie of condition of having gotten outside time, at least the constrictions of it. Every drug, in a sense, is the lure of knowing time."

Thank you Peter. And let's hope that we all manage to escape from the constrictions of time (with no need to get help from drugs though...) and to be ourselves and most important of all never forget to search and learn and try to be in peace with ourselves.