#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac
Although Kerouac really didn’t write traditional short
fiction, he was prolific in pouring his thoughts on paper. Besides his novels
and books of poetry, recently published collections of his notes and jottings have uncovered a few great clippets of planned novellas. Go Back is one of
these short pieces written before his first novel, The Town and the City, was
published. Go
Back, written in 1940, shows even this early where Kerouac was to take the
form. He had a keen sense of the ethereal nature in all of us, but only wrote for himself, of himself, and from his own eyes, wide open, and sensing emotion
everywhere.
His language was always poetic and rhythmic like the jazz and
bop he got inspiration from. It’s hard not to stand up and read this aloud to
the people on the bus next to me with their face buried in their phones or being deafened by over-produced music coming through their ears plugs drowning out the sights and sounds of real life right in front of them.
“Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying
to recapture the past. And here you are., brushing it aside, the past of
tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you
stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and
comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.”
“I tried to sigh like they do in plays, but it was a fake
one. I didn’t want to sigh, but I tried. The thing I really wanted to do was
weep, but I couldn’t do that either.”
Has any group of writers—Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs—ever
been so open, vulnerable, and emotive than these? It’s a shame that Kerouac
remains misunderstood by so many, that in the eyes of too many, he seems more
like a James Dean caricature of a rebel instead of what he was: a big ball of
energy and wonder, gulping life by the ocean-full. Even these tossed aside pages of his
notebooks have genius not seen since.
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