Jack Keroauc is an interesting figure. He was the unwitting godfather of the 60’s counterculture(something I have no doubt he would denounce) but he was deeply conservative:
“I began to understand that the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody blood of the land and were just rootless fools, the permissible fools, who really didn’t know how to go on living. I began to get a new vision of my own of a truer darkness which just overshadowed all this overlaid mental garbage of ‘existentialism’ and ‘hipsterism’ and ‘bourgeois decadence’ and whatever names you want to give it.” (The Vanity of Duluoz, 1968)
“Kerouac’s sad final years were spent in an increasingly frantic quest to find a true home for himself and his mother. On an almost yearly basis he oscillated between Florida and New England, always following the same cycle: purchase a home, move in, grow restless, sell it; purchase another one, move in, sell it; and so on. Tragically, even when he returned to Lowell for a brief time, he found that the nurturing community he had written about so fondly for so many years now existed only in his books. He yearned, as the fictional Odysseus had during his wanderings, for the familiar, for something real and stable in his life. His mistake lay in looking for these things outside of him. Nevertheless, that desire is a good, true, worthy desire, and it permeates all of Jack Kerouac’s writing. It is the reason why the Beat movement could not last. Allen Ginsberg, the poet visionary, pined for utopia and spiritual revolution. William S. Burroughs, the outlaw libertarian, pined for anarchy and gay liberation. Neal Cassady, the exiled cowboy, pined for girls and cars. Jack Kerouac, the mystic, pined for God and home.”
H/T: The American Conservative
There is nothing more heartbreaking than a man failing in the search for a home.
Colt 1911 and Walter PPK
“Patriotism is the wholesome, constructive love of one’s land and people. Nationalism is the unhealthy love of one’s government, accompanied by the aggressive desire to put down others – which becomes in deracinated modern men a substitute for religious faith. Patriotism is an appropriate, indeed necessary, sentiment for people who wish to preserve their freedom; nationalism is not.”
– Clyde N Wilson
While I, as a Romantic, think that nationalism is a good thing, my view of nationalism is in line with Dr. Wilson’s view of patriotism.
This is Nuages, a tune by the first guitar virtuoso, Django Reinhardt. The melody was popular in wartime France.
