I've just re-read this groundbreaking piece of work after twenty-five years and found it to be just as eye-opening, thought-provoking and sublime as I did in my late teens.
It is, after all, an ode to youth, and freedom, and rambling back and forth across the great, open landscape like a stone that gathers momentum as it rolls and rolls along.
Dean Moriarty is a Peter Pan that will never grow up and take real accountability. He lives in a world of Lost Boys, who one by one fall away from him - down the rabbit hole of adulthood and bitter reality. He leaves a trail of women - Wendys, and Tinkerbells, and mermaids - in his wake. He cannot stop spinning his yarns, talking his heady, drug-induced philosophies. He lives to fight another battle with the law, because he views the world as his personal prairie, from which he freely plunders, like some cowboy of a bygone age.
Sal Paradise is the observer, the recorder, Dean's conscience, and his ego. He idolizes Dean, and yet he can see through the cracks to the underbelly of Dean's implausible lack of maturity, and he knows that Dean's hijinks will one day catch up with him, when his limbs are too weary to simply keep running.
Sal goes on to publish his manuscript - to make use of his adventures, all retold and recounted, chalked up to experiences which will be recalled upon melancholy, summer night porches, from a rocking chair, served over the ice cool lemonades of one's twilight years.
Many of us are Sals, forever looking back upon the days we spent with our own Moriartys.
I simply love the wild spirit that stirs upon each page of this trailblazing book. It pleases me to read of teenagers from long past decades and realize that they too were sex and drug-fuelled youths, stumbling in a daze, trying desperately to forge their own way forward... wondering all the while, just what it's all about.
And Aren't we all left wondering? Even still?
On the Road will never age. Kerouac awakens something in us all - a longing to divulge our own stories and hold tight to our past.