فکر میکنم دو سال پیش بود که این کتاب را دست گرفتم و سه ماهی طول کشید تا هر شب چند صفحه اش را بخوانم و چند دقیقه ای در خلسه تخیلش فرو شوم تخیل شیرین سفر.... آن موقع هنوز سفر کردن فقط تفریح و وقت گذرانی بود.... این کتاب یک شکل دیگر از رفتن و کنده شدن را یادم داد یک شکل خیلی خوب و متفاوت را.... من از کرواک عزیز هیچهایک را یاد گرفتم اینکه دست گرفتن و با ماشین عبوری رفتن فقط مفتی سواری نیست.... به همه دوستانی که سفر را دوست دارند و به دنبال حال و هوای دیگری در سفر هستند کتابهای کرواک را توصیه میکنم

چند سال پیش که فیلم به درون طبیعت وحشی رو دیدم به سفر با کوله پشتی علاقه مند شدم و همیشه دلم میخواست یک بار تجربه اش کنم تا اینکه کتاب ولگردهای دارما رو خوندم و انقد واژه هیچهایک برام جذابیت پیدا کرد که بعد تموم کردن کتاب زدم به جاده؛ از اون موقع سالها گذشته ولی من همون آدم ۱۸ ساله ام که هنوزم هیچهایک و جاده و حرف زدن با راننده کامیونا و آدمای دیگه میتونه براش جذاب باشه و به این واسطه یاد بگیره ازشون.به واسطه جک کرواک بود که فهمیدم رایگان سواری معنی درستی برای واژه هیچهایک نیست و ی چیزی ورای این حرفاست که تا تجربه اش نکنی متوجه نمیشی.برای دوستانی که از زندگی شهری خسته شدن و قصد سفر دارن خوندن این کتاب و دیدن فیلم به درون طبیعت وحشی رو توصیه میکنم.همچنین خانومها فیلم وحشی (۲۰۱۴)رو هم میتونن ببینن که بهشون انگیزه و اعتماد بنفس به جاده زدن رو بده‌.

پ ن : بعد از چهار سال کوله گردی مداوم، از روستا به روستا و شهر به شهر ایران رو میچرخم،بخاطر کرونا مجبور‌ شدم تمومش کنم..اما به آرزوم رسیدم..قبل از ۳۰ سالگی‌ بیشتر از ۵ سال توی سفر و طبیعت بودم و از زندگی شهری دور بودم....
امیدوارم بتونم ی سفر ده ساله رو دور دنیا تجربه کنم..این تنها چیزیه که میخوام..۱۰ سال سفر با کوله پشتی دور دنیا ، قبل از اینکه به ۵۰ سالگی برسم.

Un buen libro. Contiene una cantidad de frases que harán volar el pensamiento. Puedo decir que aprendí algunas cosas. Su lectura es calmada y a veces frenética. Por momentos el libro se estanca un poco (sobre todo en la subida a las montañas), pero luego en su cima vuelve la tranquilidad reflexiva de un Kerouac que se enfrasca en el descubrimiento de la primera ley del budismo: "la vida es sufrimiento".

فکر می کردم این کتاب می تواند آن چیزی باشد که لازم داشتم. کتابی از جنسی دیگر و متفاوت. شاید هم باشد. اما قطعاً این کتابی که به فارسی توسط فرید قدمی ترجمه شده آن نبود که می خواستم.
مشکل اصلی من، همینطور که مشخص است، با ترجمه این کتاب است. مشکلی که وقتی بزرگتر می شود که هجده هزارتومن قیمتِ کتاب می اندیشم. و اینکه مخاطب، با این قیمت، چه ارزشی برای ناشر و مترجم دارد؟ خیلی نمی توانم به ناشر خورده بگیرم، چون سیستم نشر در ایران، کماکان قدیمی و ناکارآمد است. ولی اگر حداقل یک ویراستار درست حسابی برای این ترجمه در نظر می گرفتند، می توانستم تا آخر آن را تحمل کنم.
نقد اصلی من روی ترجمه فرید قدمی است. خیلی وقت ها لازم نیست نسخه اصلی یا دست کم ترجمه دیگری باشد که بتوان فعل مقایسه را انجام داد. این مورد هم اینگونه است. اشکالات ترجمه، به عقیده بنده، در چند دسته قرار میگیرد که کتاب را عملاً غیرقابل خواندن و نثر را تحمل ناپذیر کرده.
دسته اول، اشکال مترجم در انتخاب نادرست مترادف فارسی برخی واژه ها است که عملاً جمله را بی معنی می کند. برای مثال، مترجم محترم برای واژهemptiness از واژه تهیدگی استفاده کرده. بار اول که این مترادف فارسی ��ا دیدم کلی تعجب کردم و فرهنگ های فارسی دهخدا و عمید و معین را زیر و رو کردم که بفهمم تهیدگی از کجا آمده و چه معنایی دارد. مشخص است که به در بسته خوردم. بعدها دیدم مترجم برای این لغت پانویس زده و واژه اصلی را هم آورده. کارکرد این لغت با توجه به اهمیت آن در ذن، در اثر هم زیاد است و متاسفانه مترجم از لغت درستی استفاده نکرده. این ایراد در جاهای دیگری هم دیده می شود.
دسته دوم، اشکال مترجم در ترجمه کردن برخی از اسامی مربوط به مکان ها یا چیزهای مشخص است. البته بعضی جاها هم مترجم اینها را ترجمه نکرده و فارسی آن را در متن آورده است. برای مثال جایی در متن آمده: "پرنسس را قب�� از آن هم می شناختم و دیوانه اش بودم، در سیتی، تقریباً یکسال پیش." (ص 40)
علاوه براینکه ساختار این جمله، ترجمه لغت به لغت (که مترجم گوگل هم آن را انجام می دهد) جمله اصلی و کاملاً نامفهوم است، واژه سیتی به هیچ عنوان کارکرد درستی ندارد. مترجم پانویس زده که city: نیویورک سیتی. (احتمالاً در متن آمده the city که ظاهراً اشاره ای به شهر نیویورک دارد.) مشکل من این است که اگر مترجم به جای سیتی، خودِ نیویورک را می نوشت لازم نبود چشم مخاطب از متن به پانویس و حاشیه کشیده شود. این ایراد هم در کل متن تکرار شده.
دسته سوم، برخی لغت های عامیانه است که عملاً واژه مترادفی در زبان دیگر ندارند. مثلاً ما در فارسی عامیانه از واژه های مثلِ "زاخار" "چاقال" "عن آقا" و امثالهم استفاده می کنیم که برای آنها معادلی به زبان های دیگر وجود ندارند. چون این واژه ها فارغ از معنای لغوی، در گفتار عامیانه به کار برده می شوند و به مفهوم مشخصی دلالت ندارند. این قضیه در زبان های دیگر هم وجود دارد. در ترجمه این واژه ها، مترجمین معادلی را که در زبان عامیانه مقصد همان کارکرد عامیانه زبان مبدا را دارند انتخاب می کنند. در متن (ص 17) نویسنده از این قسم واژه ها در معرفی یک عده از شخصیت ها استفاده می کند (fud و booboo) که نویسنده کمترین تلاشی برای اینها نکرده و همین لغات را به صورت فارسی (یعنی فاد و بوبو) در متن آورده که بسیار بسیار کوبنده در ذوق مخاطب است.
مشکل دیگری که خیلی من را اذیت می کرد در این ترجمه، لحن ساختگی ترجمه است. مشخص است که لحن نویسنده، عامیانه و تاحدودی صمیمی است. مشکلاتی که یاد کردم عملاً باعث می شود ترجمه لغت به لغت مترجم از زبان مبدا و نادیده گرفتن زبان مقصد باعث شده لحن صمیمی نویسنده، تصنعی و ساختگی شود. به هر حال ترجمه آثار نسل بیت به فارسی کار سختی است چرا که نویسنده تجربه ای را می نویسد که آن را زیسته و کیست که ادعا کند در ایران، در آن فضای ملتهب، نیست انگار، "بودا"زده و هیپی‌طور، همان تجربیاتِ نویسنده های نسل بیت را زیسته باشد یا لااقل کمترین درکی به آن داشته باشد که بتواند آن را به مخاطب بومی خودش بشناساند. (مثلاً بزرگترین مشکل براتیگان خوانی در ایران ترجمه های عجیب و غریب آن است که البته ظاهراً مخاطبِ دنبالِ مُد خیلی هم اهمیتی به کیفیت متن نمی دهد.)
اینطور می شود که این کتاب برای من هزینه کردن بیخود و ضرر مالی می شود، نه تافته ای جدا بافته و اثری با طعمی متفاوت.

I was reminded of this book when it popped up in my feed and true to character I decided to write a short review, using what I do remember. What I do remember is throwing myself into this book after loving 'On the Road' (no originality points here, I know...) in my late teens. I struggled mightily with this one though, and could never let go of my disappointment of it not being OTR... Maybe I will give it another chance some day.

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples in this world.”

So this will be one of those journaling/reflection kinda reviews, where I look back at my life a little as I look back at a book I read passionately and now perhaps read a little more dispassionately, somewhat more critically. I was a high school and college student in the turbulent late sixties and early seventies when I first read this book, and loved it, was maybe my favorite of all of them at one time.

Even though I went with my friends to a church-related high school and college, there were plenty of drugs and partying, and barbers went bankrupt as everyone grew their hair long. Many of my male friends had hair to their waists; I was not a huge drug-user, and only had a modest “Afro” of sorts. We were most of us questioning Christianity and considering Buddhism through Hesse and others. It was for me and many of my friends a time of celebration of the arts--writing poetry, fiction, playing music--mostly guitars--theater, a combination of celebration--Woodstock was 1968, flowers in your hair, celebration of nature, but alas, I was too young to go--and protest--racism, Viet Nam, irrelevant schooling, the destruction of the environment (the first Earth Day was 1970).

Bruce Cockburn, “Going to the Country”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLZFF...

I write this after several weeks of traveling for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, in Alaska, Colorado, northern Wisconsin, reveling in the beauties of nature, climbing, hiking, even as the natural world burns, the hottest summer on record, no climate action by my country.

There were many road trip novels and movies that were popular then, such as Easy Rider, or Herman Hesse’s journey to the East novels, but none were more influential on American youth culture than Jack Kerouac’s several road books, chief among them On the Road and Dharma Bums. Keroauch kept detailed journals of his travels and transposed them into what we are now calling auto-fiction, using different names for his friends. On the Road was more of a party novel, a kind of (male-centric, but maybe most of them were) celebration of life, nature, sex and wine.

The reason I was somewhat nostalgic in reading Dharma Bums is that I know his hopeful and celebratory depiction of the mid fifties and his turn to spirituality was a little more than a decade before he would die of (in part) the complications of alcoholism that plagued him his whole life. I guess I had somewhat ignored his fairly honest depictions of drunkenness in this book--though it was harder to ignore in the horrific, delirium tremens-soaked Big Sur. Kerouac always struggled with demons--nature and simplicity and focus and ecstasy on his writing fought within him with booze-soaked self-destruction. In short, Kerouac was one of many self-destructive artists who managed to romanticize the wild life in their writing, but in that time he was an icon, a legend, a hero; now I look back on him somewhat wistfully as an old distant friend who I regret experienced no friend/family “interventions.”

1958 saw the publication of The Dharma Bums, a year after On the Road, though the events it depicts are some years later, when Kerouac was in his thirties. These books are part of the multi-book saga Kerouac was to later call The Duluoz Legend, something he intended to eventually edit as one long saga, with names consistent throughout. The center of the book is the relationship Jack (named Ray Smith) had with Gary Snyder (and Japhy Ryder), a Buddhist poet (he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island), environmental activist, logger, teacher.

Snyder is much honored in this book as a true scholar and practitioner of Buddhism and lifelong lover of nature, teaching Kerouac all of these things, discouraging him at times from drinking too much. Kerouac comes off much of the time as a drunken “holy fool” who means well, but is naive, sweet, lonely. He’s trying at this point to keep from having sex with women, to renounce much of the world and live in harmony with nature. Ryder takes him climbing the Matterhorn, which prepares him for his work as a fire lookout on Desolation Mountain in Washington.

Smith, of Ryder: “What hope, what human energy, what truly American optimism was packed in that neat little frame of his.”

Ryder to Smith: “You just drink too much.”

The book has a lot of endless hitchhiking (yes, everyone I knew hitchhiked long distances in that period) and drunken reveling in it I might not have noticed as quite so dull when I was myself on the road west, doing a bit of that same kind of drinking myself. I might not have seen then the ways women are merely “appreciated” (okay, lusted after) but never much talked with about all these great ideas. Women are dancing presences (and notably, participants in tantric sex, or yabyum, in this book) but are as with On the Road, largely peripheral to the boys’ club, alas. I probably never really fully realized that until I read critiques of The Beat movement (akin to critiques of the Black Panthers, the SDS, and so on), as revolutionary in its intentions but not with respect to women.

Snyder wrote Kerouac to say, "Dharma Bums is a beautiful book, & I am amazed & touched that you should say so many nice things about me because that period was for me really a great process of learning from you. . . " but he thought the book--and it is--uneven, often sloppy, with erratic doilaogue and poor transitions and patches of dullness even among its lyrical prose. Ryder comes off as a Buddhist icon in the book but also a sex god, having sex with many women, and Snyder later regretted what he saw as a misogynistic interpretation of Buddhism in it.

Buddhist scholars such as Allen Watts were quick to be critical of the book, which dismayed Kerouac, and which might have been instrumental in his rejecting Buddhism. Later in life he would refer to himself as more of a “Catholic mystic,” but even then, that is a generous depiction Catholic mystics such as Thomas Merton, would be baffled about. Though the last chapters of Dharma Bums are exultant about Buddhism and nature, Desolation Angels, based on Kerouac’s journals of that same period, would mark his more honest disillusionment with Buddhism.

To his credit, Kerouac depicts Smith in humorously self-deprecating ways at points. When Ryder, out working all day, comes home to find him sitting around, drinking, doing nothing, chides him, Smith says, “I am the Buddha known as The Quitter,” and Ryder laughs at his friend. Smith here is the emblem of “Tune in, Turn On and Drop out” that would gain some steam in the sixties, rejecting the Western Capitalist Military-industrial Complex way of life that many young people would also reject (for awhile?). Communes, ashrams, communal living.

Service to the world? Well, Ryder was a good and compassionate man, not particularly politically motivated or socially conscious. Ryder’s family thinks his unwillingness to get a job is laughable. When he talks of his Buddhist beliefs they and some women he meets just say things like, “Ah, baloney.”

Smith’s brother-in-law listens to him pontificate about “growing from suffering” and he says, “if that’s true I should be big as a house by now!”

Naivete? When Rosie commits suicide, I think Ryder is insensitive, regretting he had not said more to convince her how to live her life, when it is clear to me she was paranoid schizophrenic, needing hospitalization at that point.

Of all the partying, that tired me on this reading, I did like a depiction of a San Francisco reading where Alvah Goldbrook (Allen Ginsberg) read “Howl” (or “Wail” in the book) which i also heard him read in Boulder at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a school of Naropa University

Mostly it's a happy and hopeful and celebratory book, a book of striving in hope for spiritual purity, falling short of those ideals regularly.

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there.” Youth!

It’s a book of celebration of youth and nature and kindness and love. It’s not a great book, or not as great as I thought it was in my youth, but I acknowledge the spirit in it with my generous rating. It has some good writing in it:

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
Having just come back from hiking and climbing, and in celebration of my own lifetime of commitment to the environment, I nod to this book, one of the books that helped me celebrate it, in all its goofy, Holy Fool joie de vivre.

Some good and hopeful lines:

“I called Han Shan in the morning fog: Silence, it said.”

“And I promised myself I would begin a new life. . .”

“I realized this would do me good and get me away from drinking and maybe make me appreciate a whole new life. . .”

“Something will come of it all in the great Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all of our phantom unjaundiced eyes. . . Who knows? Maybe the world might wake and burst out into a beautiful flower of Dharma everywhere.” Alas, wouldn’t it have been pretty to think so.

Yes, Gary Snyder is, in July 2022, still alive, at 93, alive more than fifty years longer--and still counting--than Kerouac:

https://www.beachamjournal.com/journa...

Don't read Kerouac when you're too young. Read him as you join that long death march called steady employment. Then look back. Look back to all the people you knew, those people who went here and there, those people who knew odd patches of philosophy and poetry. They fucked. They doped and boozed in desperate self medication. Look back at yourself.

Jack travels here and there. He knows people with Odd Knowledge. They have plumbed the breadth and depth of human existence. They get laid in the era before The Pill. They doped and boozed. They had the Knowledge.

Read Kerouac and look back. And then it occurs to you. It's all been done before. None of your old pals will ever be quite what he once was in your memory. And you'll know Kerouac for what he was. And you know that amidst all the lies, he told the truth. The truth with a little 't'.

He wanted to fool you, but he couldn't. It wasn't in him; he hadn't the talent for it. He had only enough to tell you the way he had wanted it to be. How he wanted it to be when he looked back on it.

Yeah.

"You don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others." -Japhy Ryder

For the last year I've carried this book with me everywhere I've went. Once, I picked up the book and read the first 30 pages and put it back in my bag that holds my laptop. But that was months ago and I was a different person, probably more optimistic about where I was at and where I was headed.

Lately, I've decided to start reading again. Now that I look back on it, I didn't want to read The Dharma Bums in grey. I tried to read Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and, after feeling like a failure for going to one of my elements, to work, to program, and feeling that I knowing absolutely nothing about the trade that I chose and love, and, then, realizing that I knew absolutely nothing about my other element, my martial arts background, and, furthermore!!, realizing that other than those two things that I knew nothing about any other element, well, that a book about Nothingness and Being made perfect sense!, because I needed to learn to be content with the idea that I knew nothing.

All the while, buying more and more books that I'll likely NEVER get a chance to read because I have a spending problem, I read and tried to understand as much about this book as I could. About 20 pages into it, I decided that I needed to get a primer to Existentialism and set Sartre aside. And it was then when I decided to resume this book, but starting over from scratch.

I read this book in the quiet, that is to say, the silence was too loud most of the time. I usually read with a million distractions in place, including the television, texting, Facebook, tea pot whistling, cars going by on the street... And I remember the first time I picked up this book, I thought that Japhy and Ray hated each other. But it's different now. These two guys are like two Zen masters going at it and maybe their brands of Buddhism are completely trash!, but they lived like Royalty and that's all that matters.

Later, when Ray went to Desolation, this book oddly turned Walden on me - something which was a welcome change of pace since I've been considering re-reading Walden.

These dudes apparently meditated everywhere, and by reading this book in the noisy environment that is my brain, and nothing else, well, let's just say that I probably should meditate more often, with tea and port, at the bars, at the clubs, at work, whilst driving and on the airplane, with an emphasis on all that I really have, which, when finished cooking, is a nice tender heart with a side of leafy greens of compassion tossed with pure house dressing. Some of you have been eating heartily from plates that others passionately prepare for you and when the feast comes to an end, without so much a warm "thank you!", you crash another potluck with empty hands and empty hearts. And if that's in your (Buddha?) nature, then a Saint you are.

But remember, Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. I think I understand what Kerouac meant when he said, "the final sin, the worst, is righteousness." Indeed.

---

One chapter: Ten

One mantra: "Comparisons are odious."

One quote: "Everybody carries on like it was a dream, shit, like they were themselves a dream or dots. Pain or love or danger makes you real again." -Kerouac

One page: 73

Forget 'On the Road'. I've been reading a lot of spiritual/philosophical books this year, getting into that area - especially Zen. I've read 'Siddhartha', 'Demian', 'The Alchemist', 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet', Mishima's 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion'... But, none of them 'changed' my life. I wanted a lot of them too. I wanted to say 'Siddhartha' changed me. Or that Pirsig did. But none of them did. However. 'On the Road' was my second book of 2019 and now I have read this, my 111th book of the year (isn't that a great looking number to write?) and it is far better. In fact, this book, to the extent that a book genuinely can, has changed my life somewhat. Or changed my perception of life. Things are changing for me, anyway. Reading this has helped me decide where I'm going to start steering to, and what I want to be when I get there. So, yes, this is going in my favourites. Thanks, Kerouac. Now, excuse me, I'm going to fill this review with quotes. If you don't care, then end here. There will be a lot; I'm not sorry.

‘We rolled into our sleeping bags, it was freezing cold now, about eleven o’clock, and talked a while more before one of us just didn’t answer from the pillow and pretty soon we were asleep.’

‘But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I’d also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.’

‘With my sneakers it was easy as pie to just dance nimbly from boulder to boulder, but after a while I noticed how gracefully Japhy was doing it and he just ambled from boulder to boulder, sometimes in a deliberate dance with his legs crossing from right to left, right to left and for a while I followed his every step but then I learned it was better for me to just spontaneously pick my own boulders and make a ragged dance of my own.
“The secret of this kind of climbing,” said Japhy, “is like Zen. Don’t think. Just dance along. It’s the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is more monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen.” Which it was.’

“‘What a strange thing is man…like in the Bible it says, Who knoweth the spirit of man that looketh upward? This poor kid ten years younger than I am is making me look like a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn’t got any money: he doesn’t need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this. And what gouty millionaire could get up this rock anyhow? It took us all day to climb.” And I promised myself that I would begin a new life. “All over the West, and the mountains in the East, and the desert, I’ll tramp with a rucksack and make it the pure way.” I went to sleep after burying my nose under the sleeping bag and woke up around dawn shivering, the ground cold had seeped through the poncho and through the bag and my ribs were up against a damper damp than the damp of a cold bed. My breath was coming out in steams. I rolled over to the other ribs and slept more: my dreams were pure cold dreams like ice water, happy dreams, no nightmares.’

‘Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that lash I realised it’s impossible to fall of mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five minutes I’d guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of my sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn’t care any more I was so anxious to get out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain goats or I’d say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago, enough to raise the hair on the head of the meditating Morley by the lake, who said he looked up and saw us flying down and couldn’t believe it. In fact with one of my greatest leaps and loudest screams of joy I came flying right down to the edge of the lake and dug my sneakered heels into the mud and just fell sitting there, glad. Japhy was already taking his shoes off and pouring sand and pebbles out. It was great. I took off my sneakers and poured out a couple of buckets of lava dust and said “Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain.”’

‘We ate a little and drank a lot of tea and arranged all our stuff. I had never had a happier moment in my life than those lonely moments coming down that little deer trace and when we hiked off with our packs I turned to take a final look up that way, it was dark now, hoping to see a few dear little deer, nothing in sight, and I thanked everything up that way. It had been like when you’re a little boy and have spent a whole day rambling alone in the woods and fields and on the dusk homeward walk you did it all with your eyes to the ground, scuffling, thinking, whistling, like little Indian boys must feel when they follow their striding fathers from Russian River to Shasta two hundred years ago, like little Arab boys following their fathers, their fathers’ trails; that singsong little joyful solitude, nose sniffling, like a little girl pulling her little brother home on the sled and they’re both singing little ditties of their imagination and making faces at the ground and just being themselves before they have to go in the kitchen and put on a straight face again for the world of seriousness.’

‘“I wanta read about Hakuin, who went to see this old man who lived in a cave, slept with deer and ate chestnuts and the old man told him to quit meditating and quit thinking about koans, as Ray says, and instead learn how to go to sleep and wake up, said, when you go to sleep you should put your legs together and take deep breaths and then concentrate your mind on a spot one and a half inches below your navel until you feel it get like a ball of power and then start breathing from your heels clear up and concentrate saying to yourself that that centre is just here is Amida’s Pure Land, the centre of the mind, and when you wake up you should start by consciously breathing and stretching a little and thinking the same thoughts, see, the rest of the time.’”

“get married for kissakes, get a friendly smart sensitive human-being gal who don’t give a shit for martinis every night and all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen.”’

‘Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feeet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the worl is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. Only one things I’ll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they’re not hurting anyone while they’re sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy… I see him in future years stalking along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch.’

‘But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.’

‘And in keeping with Japhy’s habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean’s shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said “Thank you, shack.” Then I added “Blah,” with a little grin, because I knew that shack and mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.’

"Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creaturs in that silence and just wwaiting for us to stop all our frettin and foolin."
- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums



I recently started going to a weekly Kadampa Buddhism and meditation class at a local Unitarian church with a friend of mine. I'm far too skeptical to jump into or out of religions easily, but I have been attracted to secular Buddhism for awhile (for years I used to tell people I was a Zen Mormon). Anyway, this recent flirtation with meditation has launched me back into authors I haven't visited in a while. The last Kerouac I've read was 20 years ago, and I never read The Dharma Bums, so I figured it was a good place to start.

The novel is based losely on Kerouac (Ray Smith) and his relationship with Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder). The book was an early shot in the counter-culture movement that included Buddhism, the hippy lifestyle, mountaineering, etc. Having grown up in Utah, California, etc., there has always been a resonance from this period. I remember friends of mine in HS and college hitchhiking, riding the rails, and heading into the mountains to commune, nearly naked, with nature. We were basically just kids playing at Buddhism, and sometimes it feels like Kerouac was too. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not reading a cliché; that these are the guys who really started a lot of this. These are the beats, the generation that helped expand and energize the SF Renaissance.

Anyway, I enjoyed it; for the beats, the bums, the Buddhism, and yes even the bullshit.

This is a crazy, hilarious and fascinating tale about the quest of a bunch of friends for Dharma, "the truth". It takes the reader from the U.S. west coast to the east coast and back again, from wild parties in San Francisco and Los Angeles to nature treks in the High Sierra and the Cascades. Some of the nature scenes are in fact breathtakingly beautiful.

Love this book. When I first read it, I read it for the sex and the late night bull sessions... had not had sex, was still living at home and had no idea who Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) was. REad it more recently--now I've had sex and a million late night bull sessions, so that wasn't the thrill it had been at 16. Now I find what I admire the most is Japhy Ryder, and especially, the liveliness of Kerouac's nature writing. I've done a lot of hiking and backpacking, and my god Kerouac's sense of nature was so full of energy and motion, just brilliant stuff. Makes me want to read Desolation Angels--more of his outdoor stuff. Wow, he had a real gift for it.