A Frantic Search for Meaning and Celebrating Aimlessness in On the Road | by John Eger | Medium

Today is what would have been Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday. Having just finished On The Road: The Original Scroll I am taking today to place this groundbreaking novel within it’s given spiritual and cultural frame to look at our endless search for meaning through the eyes of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. There is a scene that happens early on in On the Road. Sal wakes up in a hotel room in Middle America and can’t remember who he is. “I spent all day sleeping in a room at a small, gloomy old hotel near the railroad line. The bed was big and clean and hard. I woke up as the sun was getting red — and for about fifteen seconds I didn’t know who I was! I was far away from home, tired from traveling, and in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my early life and the West of my future. And maybe that’s why I truly forgot who I was, on that strange red afternoon.” Jack Kerouac. On The Road In Sal’s trip from East to West,

Today is what would have been Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday. Having just finished On The Road: The Original Scroll I am taking today to place this groundbreaking novel within it’s given spiritual and cultural frame to look at our endless search for meaning through the eyes of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. There is a scene that happens early on in On the Road. Sal wakes up in a hotel room in Middle America and can’t remember who he is. “I spent all day sleeping in a room at a small, gloomy old hotel near the railroad line. The bed was big and clean and hard. I woke up as the sun was getting r