yes, please

Jack Kerouac loves the word "lugubrious." As Sal Paradise, he paints his memoir with an engaging mix of earthy and intellectual thoughts. The man of the earth is the poet. The unwashed bum is a secret genius. But so far, his life "on the road" is anything but exaggeratedly sorrowful. A lugubrious nature is merely observed in others and spun into the frame of a catchy sort of American dream, whereby a man can set out across the country with $50 and a few names to throw around and end up happy living 10 different lives in the span of one summer.

At about page 100, "On the Road" could almost end. Sal has spent an amazing summer adventuring across the country, and now he's headed back to New York. But if that were the case, this book would never have become the beat bible. At this point, you can feel that Sal is just getting started, even though he's done more hitching and busing than most people do in a lifetime. There's so much in his mind that Kerouac has only hinted at, but it lies in that fascinating mix of matter-of-fact storytelling and keen insight. It's as if ignorance and intelligence spent some time "alone and mixing up [their] souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by." Alas, that was just the result of stimulating conversation between Sal and his Mexican mistress.

He references a lot of things I have to look up to get. And at the risk of sounding like somebody on Yahoo! Answers, I'll admit even page 2 left me quizzical. But when you type Modigliani into Google, you get a much clearer picture of Marylou. If you want to know what pulling wrists is, you have to weigh arm wrestling against debating, and it's pretty clear which he means, I think. I wonder if people in 1955 sometimes made a point to read next to the encyclopedia shelf? But even if you don't bother to look up hincty or Hassel or fellahin, there's plenty of easy richness to savor: "Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries." California, of course. Not far out of this romantic mood, he first sees his exotic princess, and like any good poet he marks the occasion with the familiar sauce of life: "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

Sal's travels bring new meaning to the idea of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Everywhere he travels, he's looking for work, and he'll go as low as picking cotton to find it. Luckily he's got an extremely loving and understanding aunt back in New Jersey, who sends him cash when he's in a pinch. That's the result of living one of the classic American dreams backwards -- you usually try to leave the small towns to make it big in New York, but Sal left New York to try and make it in Hicksville. But he brings New York with him, carrying it in his pocket to rub when he's lonely: "LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle." And for as much enjoyment he got out of living in hotel rooms and tents, riding on truck beds and in rail cars, picking grapes and spending his last dollar on whiskey, he lives with the knowledge that life isn't lived in stillness. He keeps moving, even in solitude, even away from his best friends, his new friends, his love whom he knows he'll never see again: "We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."

YOU in the afterlife

I first saw "Sum" at Barnes & Noble one day, sitting on the new paperback wall. I read a page, found myself intrigued, and promptly forgot the book existed. Then I saw it again about a month ago at a thrift store near my apartment, and borrowed $2 from a friend to purchase the collection of "tales from the afterlives." Each of the 40 nugget stories is fiction, written by a neuroscientist named David Eagleman. A scientist writes fiction? This you have to see.

It took about two days to read this book, and I loved how quick it was. Basically, Mr./Dr. Eagleman thought up 40 different scenarios that we might come upon in the afterlife, some more plausible than others, some include God but some do not, and some include odd versions of God. Some include aliens. Some include different versions of yourself -- you at different phases of life, you being all the things you could have been but chose not to be, you as an actor on the stage of someone else's life, you with greater intelligence than your creator(s). And they all make some comment on the state of life. Individual life, universal life, cellular life. Most sound pretty dreadful, but the point is to make you appreciate more fully what you choose to do with your life on Earth.

"Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower." In this afterlife, you experience similar events consecutively, which is supposed to help you appreciate the randomness of real life, but on a microscopic level. As though you could say: "Hooray! I don't have to cut my fingernails every single day! I'm so looking forward to that next joyful cutting session." But the scenario doesn't acknowledge that you can still be bored with life in general. That's for another story -- the one in which Earth is populated only by people you met during your life. Of course, you end up lonely because the joy of life comes from *new* experiences.

A few of the stories include gods that are weepy and regretful, as though they blame themselves for the mess of humanity. When God isn't mentioned, there is usually some sort of Technician, Collector or Caller that serves as a crossing guard at the intersection of Now and Later. Eagleman makes playful metaphors about immortality and relationships. Self-realization and empathy are major themes, but (happily) religion is not. It's an exercise in creativity for both author and reader -- it's almost a challenge to stretch your imagination to places most people don't think much about. It reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, where "you" are the main character, and you have to decide your next step. But this book wants you to take that step literally. You're heading down Now, will you make a right or a left onto Later? He's not saying you need GPS navigation, but maybe you shouldn't just wing it. Just in case.