Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.” 

“to me a mountain is a buddha. think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin." japhy got out the tea, chinese tea, and sprinkled some in the tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile...and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups..."

     I borrowed this book from my sister to read over Thanksgiving break from college.  She said she thought that I would enjoy it and I was not disappointed, even though it was my first Kerouac novel  I found that I really did appreciate his meandering thoughts and stream of consciousness type writing.  This novel could be split into two different parts, either they were hiking through desolate forests/ climbing challenging mountains  or they were having hippy-dippy drunk poetry orgies at someone or others house.  I enjoyed the first aspect of this novel much more than said orgies, mostly because I felt that the message that I carried away from the novel I gained form these parts.  The protagonist climbed the Matterhorn (the one in California, not the Swiss Alps), trekked through the trails of California with nothing but peanuts and raisons and eventually spent an entire fire season alone at a watch tower in the wilderness.  On each of these ventures meditation and thought was common through the protagonist, as he was slowly working his way towards discovering who he was and the meaning of various aspects of life. Reading this novel made me appreciate this adventurous and slightly carless point of view, and even motivated me to start thinking of such ventures for myself. While I don't think the protagonist has a coming of age experience in the novel, reading it started the rumblings of such an experience within myself.  If you can look past the hippy dippy drunk poetry orgies, this novel is wonderful. 4.5/5