Breakfast Club: On the Road

breakfast club
running, ideas, culture

Have you ever been on a road trip?

Yes, probably, likely you have.

But have you ever been on a journey of the deep personality-changing sort, wherein you travel unburdened, unmoored, and untethered from the part-ic-ular mundanities, private concerns and everyday evaluations that bog down both mind and spirit? Have you taken a road trip where the tarmac unfurls before you in a stream of asphalt possibility, at the end of which, should you get there, you might find some timeless truth that opens up the full potential of your soul?

Such were the trips that writer Jack Kerouac pined for in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The result was his famously rambling travels alongside writer/hobo/guru/cocksman Neal Cassady.

He packaged those experiences in the great Beat tome, On the Road. If you haven't read it, Kerouac compacts a series of stories, thinly fictionalizing his travels back and forth across the country in the 1940s and 1950s. The protagon…