while reading 'On the Road..'

[flaviomatani]

Reading Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ and, curiously, getting what can only be a false memory of having read it before, many years ago, in Spanish translation in my old house in Catia, when the world was young and the nomadic life he describes still was possible. And, what a contrast with the necessarily sedentary life of one who, on the one hand, earns his living teaching music and therefore must be settled in one place but, also, one who always regarded the outside world with curiosity and desire but also with a certain amount of fear and mistrust. The shy boy from Catia ended up in London as a citizen of the world but still regards the world as a strange, alien and hostile entity, if sometimes also full of wonder. That tale of crossing the American plains on a truck platform under the bright stars resonates in me and evokes other stories, the glow of marine phosphorescence surrounding us in a cargo ship on another night under many stars long, so long ago, at some point where the Caribbean becomes the Atlantic, leaving behind a trail of bright foam under the moonlight as the ship broke through the waves on its way to this England that would become my home...