Jack Kerouac - Two Christmas Stories read by A Poetry Channel

Happy Holidays!

The first essay, Home At Christmas, is an excerpt from a longer piece written for Glamour Magazine in 1961. Not long after he wrote his masterful, "Big Sur", a novel dealing with the pitfalls of sudden fame and alcoholism and the protagonist's attempts at recovery... the disparity between the two is striking and shows the versatility of this extraordinary chronicler. I have found the unabridged version and will be posting my recording for it tomorrow.

The second essay "NOT LONG AGO JOY ABOUNDED AT CHRISTMAS" was written by Jack Kerouac in 1957, the same year as the publication of his iconic masterpiece, "On The Road" and is more of a reflection by Kerouac of the demise of the wonderment of Christmas and the Christmas spirit. Like "Home At Christmas', the essay was written with immense visual and emotional detail bringing the reader into Kerouac's life as a child, seeing Christmas through his eyes. Of importance here is to note how much Kerouac reveled in his Catholic upbringing. This again brings us full circle to understanding Kerouac's masterpiece, "On The Road", which according to him "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God." It is therefore not a coincidence that during this same period, he would write about what he sees as the demise of the meaning of Christmas with the opening paragraph of this short piece of:

"I think the celebration of Christmas has changed within the short span of my own lifetime. Only twenty years ago, before World War II, it seems to me that Christmas was still being celebrated with a naive and joyous innocence whereas today you hear the expression that "Christmas comes once a year like taxes".

From this opening sentence, Kerouac then proceeds to describe the wonderment of his youthful experience with religion. Given the piece was written during the same period as "On the Road", the reader can see that at the heart of all his work, is the Catholic and Beat insistence upon an underlying spirituality that inhabits all creation. Kerouac saw the world, and everything in it, as Holy. In his view, all experience was an opportunity to, as Wordsworth put it, “see into the life of things.” And as Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty and all the other rogues, misfits and castaways of “On the Road” go tearing about the country in a wild ecstasy, their adventures of reckless abandon really become inquiries into what are the real values, truths and myths of America.

Видео Jack Kerouac - Two Christmas Stories read by A Poetry Channel канала A Poetry Channel