Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online Page B

his Buddhist document Some of the Dharma, Kerouac referred to these early pieces: “[...] I should have been told to stay home, in the sandbank, in the woods, praising Nothingness as I had done that Summer layin around the grass with dogs and Walt Whitman and grass ’tween my teeth, and I guarantee you there would have been no torrent of suffering—Everything I did as a kid was instinctively right —[. . . .]”
    One night I sat on the curbstone of a street in the city and looked across the road at a little rose-covered cottage which was rickety, like the fence around it, and it looked old, not Colonial, but old. That’s where I used to live, I said aloud to myself in a tone of yearning. I tried to sigh like they do in plays, but it was a fake one. I didn’t want to sigh, but I tried. The thing I really wanted to do was weep, but I couldn’t do that either.
    The city was all about me, and the electric lamp above me, and the house was there and my memories flashed through my head and the scene before me supplemented them. I, small and dreamy, dashing about—over that banister, up that old tree of mine, around the yard, through the back fences . . . . . and the shed with the old organ in it, and the sounds I used to hear and now they are dissolved, their scientific sound waves far away.
    I saw a man walking toward his destination and I felt bad. He was hurrying, and I was sitting thinking about the past. The dream I used to have . . . . . snow, tinkling icicles, laughter, sunshine, sleighs . . . . . and the nightmares too. And the man was hurrying and I was sitting quietly, staring at my old home.
    The old cat, I thought, a bundle of bones now, somewhere. The cat who used to sit right there on the porch, placidly enjoying his digestion.
    Later on, I left and I went toward the house before that, where my brother had died. Here, the memories were now vague and childish. I was three and four there, three and four years old.
    I remembered the high snow, my sandwich, calling for my mother, weeping, all. Myself . . . . . at the church . . . . . unabashed, they burying my brother. Why do you cry, I ask my mother and sister. Why do you cry? Why?
    Now a man comes up the street and walks right into my old house.
    Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying to recapture the past. And here you are, brushing it aside, the past of tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.
    Get out of my old house!
    And then on the way home, I think about the fool and the other fools, and myself a fool. Hurrying away the past of tomorrow, like I had hurried away the past of today, in the past.
    Fools, I think. Myself a fool. I must take it slow now and look at the present and say to myself: Look, John, hold the present now because someday it will be very precious. Hug it, and hold it.
    And just yesterday I was sauntering home thinking about the future. The future! What a fool, I, myself, a fool, hurrying.

Nothing
    I am going to write about nothing. Nothing at all. Did you ever think hard and say, what is nothing? Nothing is really nothing at all to try to figure out.
    Look, a comet comes down from nothing crashes into the earth and the earth is scattered to the winds of nothing in little pieces and suppose I survive and you survive and we begin our journey through nothing.
    How would you like that? I would like that if I could be conscious of it. It would be a great experience to travel up and down and to the left and the right through nothing at all and just keep traveling around and seeing nothing but distant stars and feeling nothing’neath my feet and just flying about through nothing.
    If I could live through it I would enjoy it. But soon I would get hungry and I would want to eat something but there is nothing in the line of something in nothing, so