![]() In this novel of life On the Road, experience for Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, Kerouac's fictional alter ego, who shambles along after Dean's madcap adventures, must be intensified to strip one's rational preoccupations with this world and give them a sense of oneness with the All-knowing God. Fictionalized as Dean Moriarty, Kerouac saw his friend Neal Cassady as an "archetypal American Man," and rendered his character both "Beatific," in the sense mentioned above, and "Beat," in the sense of being alienated from the mainstream of American middle-class life. On the Road, first published in 1957, epitomized to the world what became known as "the Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. ![]() In 1954, Jack Kerouac had a vision in a Catholic church in Lowell, Massachusetts, that told him that the real meaning of "Beat" was "Beatific," in the sense of converting alienation into spiritual transcendence. And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. ![]()
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