Jack Kerouac thought he was a Buddhist but he was not a Buddhist. He was too Catholic for Buddhism to really stick. He could not get the suffering out of his soul.
He was, in fact, a dervish--which is what you get when you cross a Catholic with a Buddhist--something that he discovered when he was in the Maghreb.
In the end, what John Clellon Holmes said of Kerouac was more true than anything anyone else ever said, including anything he had ever said about himself:
If he'd known how the world worked he never would have broken his heart over it.
(Quoted in Jack's Book, 318).
No comments:
Post a Comment