September 05, 2003 - 10:24 a.m.

I've been re-reading Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" lately. That's the novel about Kerouac's friendship with poet/anarchist/ecologist/translator Gary Snyder, which vividly describes their hiking in California's Sierra Nevada mountains and their radical (for the 1950s) philosophy of spiritual rather than material attainment. As always when I read Keroauc, I'm struck by his ability to find the very heart of his subject, whether it's the deepest core of a character's soul or his own intense, all-encompassing search for salvation (even as he realizes salvation is unnecessary, since we're all already saved). He seeks out imperfect heroes, like Neal Cassady, and in the process of finding the shining gold deeply buried in their souls, reveals the oneness in all things and the pitfalls of seeing just the surface.

Admittedly, I have some trouble with Kerouac's residual Catholic mysticism and his love of the minutiae of Buddhist doctrine, but if anyone can strip away the superfluities from religion and make it seem vital and alive, it's Kerouac. I'll probably never be religious myself, but I can appreciate Kerouac's mysticism for its passionate striving toward an understanding of the unknown: if you remove the mystic jargon and leave just his passionate desire to grasp the subtle mechanics of the universe, the intensity of his thinking parallels Einstein's.

Of course mystics and scientists don't both seek the same thing, even if they might both start and end up in more or less the same place (Von Heisenberg's principle at work). There is much I disagree with in Kerouac's thinking, but no matter; he remains one of my favorite authors because he spent his whole life seeking not only to reach humankind's highest potential, but in his finest moments, helping his fellow human beings achieve that potential as well.

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