13 September 2008

Committed to Reading

Written by Iris Watts Hirideyo (

)
Published on September 13th, 2008 @ 05:13:31 am, using 2216 words, 49 views

Categories: Inspired by, the written word, Favorite Quotes / Passages, Books

Photo by Iris H.

I have three books left to read from my previous reading list - two of which I’m halfway through. And being the girl who’s never been taught to be where she is, I’ve already made a second list. Ugh!

The Conversations - Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
On Beauty
Walden
The New York Trilogy
White Teeth (Reread)
Wuthering Heights (Reread)
On the Road
Divisadero
Naked
Dress your family in corduroy and denim

Photo by Iris H.

They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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!’

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

[More:]

…most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

I told Terry I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and rich as the passage of time itself.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen. Port Allen - where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swungaround a circular drive in ywllow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we droe away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? - sleep. But this foolish gang was bending onward.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

‘Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there - and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.’

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

I knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn’t want to bother with the truth.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

In the gray dawn that puffed ghostlike about the windows of the theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night’s total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down - till they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

Noon usually found us reclined in Babe’s back yard among the little Denver kids who played cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

‘He’s on his way already, I got this news from my grapevine. Dean bought a car and is coming out to join you.’ Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore - they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.’ And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money. I have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her made me flinch. In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach. Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that. At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

‘How far do they carry out these loyaties and wonders! What’s going to happen to them? Would they try to follow the car all the way to Mexico City if we drove slow enough?’

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

“You were the best in the whole show,” my mother said, stopping for frozen pizza on our way home. “I mean it, you walked onto that stage and all eyes went right to you.”

It occurred to me then that my mother was a better actor than I could ever hope to be. Acting is different than posing or pretending. When done with precision, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. Stripped of the costumes and grand gestures, it presents itself as an unquestionable truth. I didn’t envy my mother’s skill, neither did I contradict her. That’s how convincing she was. It seemed best, sitting beside her with a frozen pizza thawing on my lap, to simply sit back and learn.

(Naked - David Sedaris)

—— ∫ ——

It made me sad and desperate to see so many people, strangers whose sheer numbers eroded the sense of importance I was working so hard to invent. Where did they come from, and why couldn’t they just go home? I might swipe their trays off the belt without once wondering who these people were and why they hadn’t bothered to finish their breaded cutlets. They meant nothing to me, and watching them move down the line toward the cashier, it became apparent that the feeling was mutual. They wouldn’t even remember the meal, much less the person who had provided them with their piping hot tray. How was it that I was important and they were not? There had to be something that separated us.

(…)

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you’ll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common. At the time, though, I still believed that such a warm and heady feeling might last forever and that in embracing it fully, I might approximate the ame wistful feeling adults found in their second round of drinks. I had hated Lisa, felt jealous of her secret life, and now, over my clotted mug of hot chocolate, I felt for her a great pride. Up and down our street the houses were decorated with plywood angels and mangers framed in colored bulbs. Over on Coronado someone had lashed speakers to his trees, broadcasting carols over the candy-cane forest he’d planted beside his driveway. Our neighbors would rise early and visit the malls, snatching up gift-wrapped Dustbusters and the pom-pommed socks used to protect the heads of golf clubs. Christmas would arrive and we, the people of this country, would gather around identical trees, voicing our pleasure with worn clichés. Turkeys would roast to a hard, shellacked finish. Hams would be crosshatched with x’s and glzed with fruit - and it was fine by me. Were I to receive a riding vacuum cleaner or even a wizened proboscis monkey, it wouldn’t please me half as much as knowing we were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen. From this moment on, the phrase “ho, ho, ho” would take on a whole different meaning; and I, along with the rest of my family, could appreciate it in our own clannish way. It suddenly occurred to me. Just like that.

(Naked - David Sedaris)

—— ∫ ——