They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art...

Le bus de neuf heures vers l'Ouest s'étirait en bleu acier sous le soleil de la gare routière.

Buffle assoupi prêt à traverser les plaines.

Venais de quitter Saint-Louis et ses quartiers français. 

Lafayette Square, Street, Circle.

Jolliet ici, Marquette là.

Et Cavelier de La Salle -René Robert, découvreur de la Nouvelle-France à la Louisiane.

Parlé de Twain, beaucoup, et d'Eliot, non moins.

De Kerouac aussi. Pas squatté dans les parages, pourtant, sauf erreur. Mais ma guise, as usual.

À la buvette, peu avant l'embarquement, la serveuse longiligne dont la famille est restée à Cuba.

Ses créoles en nacre. Ses mains, oiseaux légers des îles sur le comptoir.

Le café, long, suave, et un vieil air à la radio.

The Bird pour moi dans toute sa fraîcheur.

Constellation & Anthropology.

Deux thèses en une.

J'ai ouvert mon carnet des lettres musicales :

A lot of people ask me why I wrote this book or any book. All the stories I wrote are true because I believe in what I saw. I was traveling west one time at the junction of the state line of Colorado -its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah. I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fearing golden desert of even fall-  the Great Image of God with four fingers pointed straight at me. Through halos and rolls and gold foals that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand which sayeth c’mon boy, go thou across the ground. Go moan for man. Go moan. Go groan. Go groan alone. Go roll your bones. Alone. Go thou and be little beneath my sight. Go thou and be minutest seed in the pod. Go thou go thou -die hence, and if this world report you well and truly.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die -In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid : with just this one pride and consolation : my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inward to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.

So in the last page of On the Road, I describe how the hero Dean Moriarty has come to see me all the way from the West Coast just for a day or two. We’d just been back and forth across the country several times in cars, and now our adventures are over. We’re still great friends, but we have to go into later phases of our lives. So there he goes, Dean Moriarty, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walking off alone, and last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead and bent to it again. Gone.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear ? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old...

Dans le bus qui a fini par s'ébrouer, je l'ai vu tout de suite à travers la vitre : un équipage d'hier qui remontait le fleuve, pile sur ma gauche.

A regular cargo and a ration of courage.

Ces deux trappeurs plus le chat m'ont regardé avec un étonnement intense.

(Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, Penguin Books, 1993)