#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac
I wish I could write about Jack Kerouac as lucidly as Jack
Kerouac wrote about anything. He is both candid and artistic, striping himself
of the literary norms as only one writer in hundred years can do, he
captures the mind and voice of the human heart.
As most Kerouac pieces, this isn’t true short fiction, but
there being no way, and myself having no desire to categorize it, here it is. It
is the night of December 7th, 1941. The paper’s boldface headlines
announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and this young man walks the street of a
Massachusetts milltown trying to find clarity.
“Outside the window, in the yard between my house and my
neighbors, there glowed the cold crater silver of a December moon in New
England…and there was silence as of death, upon the cold hard ground. Frost
decorated the window, Dickens-like. I looked out upon the winter night, was
silent in the presence of a stupendous hush, listening for the sigh of our
slumbering hearts.”
Kerouac was famously French-Canadian, often writing about
the FC community in Lowell Massachusetts. He loved the language, calling it
more of a verbal language than a written one. However, this story was the first
example of his using it in dialogue. The French-Canadian side of him, gave him a
unique voice, and the language mixed with English gave his writing, already
steeped in poetic phrasing and musical shape, a cadence not seen anywhere else.
Notable Passage: “I was not alone. Walking down the street,
seeing barren crater glow along the shabby length of its bedded route, I
suddenly perceive the bobbing figure of another human being. Another footstep,
quicker than mine, most fretful. It is a millworker returning from the ‘night
shift.’ We pass each other in the night, moving along gracefully in opposite
directions. My brother, yet I do not know him, I do not speak to him. We only
exchange quick suspicious glances, mine is almost belligerent in its nocturnal
frown and scowl. (Ah yes, I am a fool!)”
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