The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [110]
On the dot the following Sunday morning, just like the first, daybreak revealed the sea of flat shining clouds a thousand feet below me. Every time I felt bored I rolled another cigarette out of my can of Prince Albert; there’s nothing better in the world than a roll-your-own deeply enjoyed without hurry. I paced in the bright silver stillness with pink horizons in the west, and all the insects ceased in honor of the moon. There were days that were hot and miserable with locusts of plagues of insects, winged ants, heat, no air, no clouds, I couldn’t understand how the top of a mountain in the North could be so hot. At noon the only sound in the world was the symphonic hum of a million insects, my friends. But night would come and with it the mountain moon and the lake would be moonlaned and I’d go out and sit in the grass and meditate facing west, wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter. I’d go out to my snowfield and dig out my jar of purple Jello and look at the white moon through it. I could feel the world rolling toward the moon. At night while I was in my bag, the deer would come up from the lower timber and nibble at leftovers in tin plates in the yard: bucks with wide antlers, does, and cute little fawns looking like otherworldly mammals on another planet with all that moonlight rock behind them.
Then would come wild lyrical drizzling rain, from the south, in the wind, and I’d say “The taste of rain, why kneel?” and I’d say “Time for hot coffee and a cigarette, boys,” addressing my imaginary bhikkus. The moon became full and huge and with it came Aurora Borealis over Mount Hozomeen (“Look at the void and it is even stiller,” Han Shan had said in Japhy’s translation); and in fact I was so still all I had to do was shift my crossed legs in the alpine grass and I could hear the hoofs of deers running away somewhere. Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence. Sometimes I’d get mad because things didn’t work out well, I’d spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I’d be so mad I’d want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
All I had to do was keep an eye on all horizons for smoke and run the two-way radio and sweep the floor. The radio didn’t bother me much; there were no fires close enough for me to report ahead of anybody else and I didn’t participate in the lookout chats. They dropped me a couple of radio batteries by parachute but my own batteries were still in good shape.
One night in a meditation vision Avalokitesvara the Hearer and Answerer of Prayer said to me “You are empowered to remind people that they are utterly free” so I laid my hand on myself to remind myself first and then felt gay, yelled “Ta,” opened my eyes, and a shooting star shot. The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words. I ate my soup in little doleful bowlfuls and it tasted much better than in some vast tureen…my Japhy pea-and-bacon soup. I took two-hour naps every afternoon, waking up and realizing “none of this ever happened” as I looked around my mountaintop. The world was upsidedown hanging in an ocean of endless space and here were all these people sitting in theaters watching movies, down there in the world to which I would return…. Pacing in the yard at dusk, singing “Wee Small Hours,” when I came to the lines “when the whole wide world is fast asleep” my eyes filled with tears. “Okay world,” I said, “I’ll love ya.” In bed at night, warm and happy in my bag on the good hemp bunk, I’d see my table and my