Hipsters

“It’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool.”

If your response to the preceding is “Wow, man.  That’s deep.  Really deep,” then I have a book for you.  If you respond like any sane person and say “Uh, not only is that untrue, it’s a rather stupid mantra,” then sorry, No Book for You.

The Book:  Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.  The bit above is the high point of the tale.  It occurs when Kerouac’s alter ego is climbing a mountain and get scared he will fall off, and then realizes he shouldn’t have been scared.  Deep.  Seriously Deep.  Like Wow.  Metaphor for Life, you know.  200 pages of that and you have one seriously Deep Reflection on, like, you know, Life and Stuff.    You think I’m making this up?  No way, Man.  Let me quote the Master:

“This is it. “Rop rop rop,” I’d yell at the weeds, and they’d show windward pointing intelligent researchers to indicate and flail and finagle, some rooted in blossom imagination earth moist perturbation idea that had karmacized their very root-and-stem….It was eerie.”

At this point, you have already rushed out to buy the book is some hallucinogenic haze or decided never to even think about reading this book. 

I read it for my tutorial this semester.  Each of the five students picked a book, I added a selection, and we’ll read those books this semester.  From that list, this was the book I was least looking forward to reading.  I read On the Road a few years back in a different tutorial and thought it was a tedious waste of time.  One the Road is better than The Dharma Bums, mostly, I suspect, because I read the former longer ago and so the pain of reading it has dulled.

In the discussion about the book, I gamely spent two hours trying to convince anyone in the tutorial that this book held the Secret of the Universe.  I failed.  Perhaps it is not their Dharma to see the truth that becoming a Dharma Bum holds such marvelous possibilities.  All the students seemed to think this book was just about a bunch of Losers in the 1950s who decided to pretend their Aimless Lives had Meaning.

(The students also made some disparaging remarks about hipsters.  This amused me:  Lily complains every time I listen to Vampire Weekend that it is Hipster Music.  I tell her I am a hipster, so it's OK if I listen to it.  She gets exasperated.  But, now I am puzzled:  is it OK to like Vampire Weekend, but not Jack Kerouac?)

One student seriously objected to the portrayal of women in the book.  Every woman in the book exists solely in order to have will sex with Our Heroes.  I tried to convinced her that this was the Dharma of those women; that to exist solely as sexual objects for the Dharma Bums was a Deep Meaningful experience, but she didn’t buy it.  Sigh.  My power of persuasion are lacking.

I did learn something from reading this book.  It is even easier than I thought to spin out an ersatz Buddhist philosophy and pretend you are saying something even when you know what you just said means nothing at all.  Once you realize you can’t fall off a mountain, your Dharma is realized to entail a self-actualization of a what we might ignorantly call a Soul screaming to abandon the Norms of a society which denies its Oneness.  Deep, huh?

My other odd realization:  Kerouac’s alter ego in this book spends time in a fire watchtower in the middle of nowhere.  It serves as a time for reflection.  The titular characters in Mark Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka also spend time in a fire watchtower in the middle of nowhere reflecting on life.  Presumably there is a connection, but I’d have to reread Helprin’s book to figure out what it is.

Helprin's book, by the way is worth reading.  In fact, a few years ago, the Mount Holyoke News ran a feature on Professors and the Desert Island Test for books.  (It was not a long running feature, by the way—I was the first and last entry—I guess my answers were too dull to make the series last two issues.)  I was asked to pick three books to take to a desert island, but I couldn’t pick any three books—I had to pick one 1 book from my discipline, 1 book from the last five years, and 1 free choice.  The book from the last 5 years was the hardest choice—seriously, how many books from the last 5 years are you confident you would want to read over and over and over for years on end?  So, I picked Freddy and Fredericka because it fit the category and I really liked it, and I figured maybe some student would actually read it.  So, I’ll repeat the advice again:  it’s a really good book—well worth your time.  (The other two books are also worth your time, but were much more predictable choices.  (So predictable that I suspect that even if I didn’t say what they were, anyone could guess what I said—so to confirm your guess:  The Wealth of Nations, which is a massive work of philosophy with endless side notes and ruminations masquerading as an economics book—I’d rather read it over and over than Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States.  The free book?  The Bible.  That answer had the virtue of a) being true—I really world take it—and b) being nicely scandalous for a publication at Mount Holyoke.))