and consumer culture, the Beats (Ker- ouac invented the term, which he said stood for “beatific,” or blissful, but not “beaten down”) yearned for a deeper, more sensational experience and an answer to the question “how are we to live?” Kerouac wrote: “Dean and I were embarked on a jour- ney through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him” [letter to a student, 1961]. It would seem that Sal (Kerouac) was in the midst of an identity crisis. I woke up as the sun was red- dening; and that was the one dis- tinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with trav- el, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some strang- er, and my whole life was a haunt- ed life, the life of a ghost. Sal (Kerouac) considered that the solution to the identity confusion was found in a person like Dean Moriarty: . . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman can- dles exploding like spiders across the stars. Sal believed that “the best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view.” In the course of experience, he discovered his boon, that he was a writer and that the life he had lived with Dean, the fabulous “Roman Candle,”by Michael Sperber, MD T he art of living is the ability to uselife’s inevitable traumas in someconstructive fashion. This oc-curs on an odyssey that the resilienttake that could be termed “the Journeyof the Traumatized Hero,” which isbased on comparative mythologist Jo-seph Campbell’sJourney of the Hero.1 In this essay, I compare the journeystaken by Jack Kerouac described inOnthe Roadwith the one of Mohandas K.Gandhi, related inMy Autobiography:The Story of My Experiments WithTruth.2 They are vastly different but,in one important respect, remarkablysimilar. Their journeys marked a turn- ing point in their lives—Kerouac drank himself to death, whereas Gandhi for- mulated 2 important concepts by which he lived the rest of his life. The turning point for both occurred at the “Abyss” in a schematic representation of the jour- ney Campbell described. In a figura- tive sense, both died. Kerouac, unlike Gandhi, was never reborn. The success- ful completion of the journey of the traumatized hero requires resilience.
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