Culture . 06/25/2008 11:43 PM . Cole Jeffrey

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 goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

– Jack Kerouac

I recently finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and it had a profound effect on me. It’s made me consider an important question that lies not only at the heart of Kerouac but all American literature:

What does it mean to be an American?

If you split open this one nation, indivisible, what would you find at our national core? What’s the stuff the collective soul of America is made from?

“Americana” is the term for our national imagery, the icons that are unique to this country. But if you look through our images, I think you’ll find only one real and unique metaphor for the American predicament. It’s not the Star-Spangled Banner or John Wayne or baseball.

It’s the Road.

We are a nation on the Road, always aware of our Becoming. We’re caught between an ideal and the business at hand. Between that distant horizon and the pathway at our feet. You and I are on a journey, both physical and spiritual, and we go some of the way together. None of us have a long history with the land. There is little of our blood in the ground. Our forefathers came from everywhere to be here. They came to be free, and once they were free, they bound themselves together as a nation dedicated to that principle.

Thomas Jefferson created this nation. He gave us our national identity in one line:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

That’s what it means to be an American, I think – the right to live and be free and search. Ironically, what binds us together as a society is our belief in individual freedom, in the right to go out bravely into the world to look for happiness. Jefferson was no fool. He didn’t write “Life, Liberty, and Happiness” in the Declaration because the government can’t make anybody happy. That’s no guarantee. What is granted, however, is the right to search.

And so we are a people following the wind, going west to look for that elusive dream. We started looking for it on the eastern shore and we chased it all the way to the Pacific. Now, we have to look inward. We are the pilgrims, the pioneers, the searchers. We are a country on the Road.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

On the Road is a novel about a group of “beat” characters who traveled around the country during the booming national optimism and commercial progress of the 1950s. All they needed was the slightest excuse to pack up and travel across America. Sometimes they hitchhiked. Sometimes they drove. They played around with poetry, sex, drugs, and jazz music. They were looking for real experiences.

The term “beat” (which became a household term in the 1950s thanks to Kerouac) means “exhaulted exhaustion.” The beat poets and writers in On the Road are tired of the world. They are fed up with the indelible sadness that seems to run through the whole pattern. Kerouac describes a night at the opera in Denver where he heard an opera singer cry about the “gloominess of life.” Kerouac cried with him, because that’s how he saw life.

“Beat” is also related to jazz music which is free from form and musical convention. Kerouac wanted to express himself, to ask time-old questions and make universal statements in a new way. His literature flows to its own rhythm, to a beat you can’t find in traditional grammatical structures. Language was jazz to Kerouac, and that’s the way he played it.

But the word “beat” means something even more, especially to Kerouac. Kerouac never considered himself to be the father of the “beatniks” and their generation. He considered himself to be a Catholic “mystic” searching for the voice of a silent God. In the sad brown tones of life and the gloominess of his own heart, he wanted to find God. In On the Road, there are numerous references to the sky, the stars, and heavenly things. In Kerouac’s mind, that’s where God is…or should be.

On the Road is a novel about men searching for something, searching far and wide, there and back again, under the blue canopy of the American sky and the watchful eye of a silent God. Kerouac considered his generation to be a “religious generation” on a quest for something spiritual, something to worship. All they seemed to find though, Kerouac felt, was “God’s empty chair.”

When people fail to find a destination at the end of the road, they revert to the road itself as their religion. The Path becomes the Person. For a nation of seekers, it’s the only thing that’s certain.

That’s why tolerance is the supreme virtue of a postmodern culture. If we are all on the road, all seeking, then we must be receptive and open-minded towards other people’s gods. As Dean Moriarty tells Sal Paradise in On the Road:

You spend a whole life of noninterference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way…What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.

We are a people who worship the custom-fit god and “anywhere” roads that don’t actually lead anyplace at all. The end is always sadness, though. We went out wandering but then came back home with nothing all. Home disappeared as well because we realized it was never really there to begin with.

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 dropping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and when nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of my friend Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found.

It’s like the Simon & Garfunkel song “America.” Listen to it if you can.

“We’ve all come to look for America.”

We have all come looking.

I wonder what we’ll find.

Cole Jeffrey studies English and plans extensive existential road trips in Southern California.

<