Exhumation of the Undead

It is a snowy overcast Sunday morning in the lower region of the northeastern United States. I have spent the better half of this blessed day imbibing coffee and listening to a reading of Jack Kerouac’s, The Sea is my Brother.

As is my custom, I seek out wisdom from writers. I did not seek out Jack Kerouac specifically yet found him buried deep within a collection. Confessedly, I completed the obligatory, “On the Road”, and purchased five or six Kerouac novels that sit on a bookshelf, untouched.

As a voracious reader, I cannot but help devour three novels at a time. I sometimes find that I am not prepared for a certain writer yet a day will arrive wherein a sudden awareness catches me. That is how I currently feel about “George Eliot” pen name of Mary Ann Evans. I have started Silas Mariner, Adam Bede, and Middlemarch, yet stall somewhere in chapter, the first.

I did enjoy Kerouac’s On the Road but was not passionate about it. I purchased other Kerouac novels because I knew that one day Kerouac would, again, tap me on the shoulder.

Perhaps it is this epoch of rage in which we currently live that I sought solace in Kerouac. I wish that The Sea is my Brother was my first Kerouac.

It is an allegory of Kerouac’s life torn into two parts, the Idealist vs the Realist. The protagonist and co-protagonist vye for the reader’s empathy. The winner is declared by the reader’s own collective experience in life.

In my 57th year of life, I find that my Idealist youth, like Percy Bysshe Shelley and his poetic pilgrim Alastor, did drown in a lake some years ago. That young Idealist replaced by a Realist embalmed with Apathy.

Kerouac’s The Sea is my Brother resounds as a challenge, a gaunlet thrown down before me. Shall I exhume the undying idealism of my youth? To what end?

Perhaps it shall put my restless soul at ease as my journey toward the twight continues, unimpeded.